La partie requérante à une action collective en vertu de la Loi sur les valeurs mobilières ne peut obtenir de la communication de la preuve de la partie intimée au stade pré-autorisation du recours

par Karim Renno
Renno Vathilakis Inc.

C'est l'évidence même: il est souvent beaucoup plus facile de critiquer, que d'apprécier les éléments positifs de notre système. Parce que je lis beaucoup de jurisprudence, on me demande souvent qui sont les meilleurs (et les moins meilleurs…) juges au Québec. Pour des raisons dont nous pourrons discuter un autre jour, j'évite généralement de répondre à cette question. Reste que les lecteurs assidus de mon blogue peuvent deviner ma grande admiration pour certains juges. J'attire aujourd'hui votre attention sur une décision rendue par un de ceux-là et vous invite à lire le jugement complet pour constater pour vous-même à quel point le raisonnement juridique est logique, clairement présenté et - au final - impeccable. Il s'agit de la décision rendue par l'Honorable juge Nicholas Kasirer dans Amaya inc. c. Derome (2018 QCCA 120).

Dans cette affaire, l'Appelante se pourvoit à l'encontre d'un jugement de première instance qui lui a ordonné de communiquer de la preuve au stade pré-autorisation d'une action collective intentée en vertu de l'article 225.4 de la Loi sur les valeurs mobilières. 

La question principale qui se pose est celle de savoir s'il est permis à la partie requérante dans un tel recours de demander à la partie défenderesse de la communication de la preuve avant l'autorisation. Dans un jugement détaillé, le juge de première instance a répondu par l'affirmative à cette question.

Au nom d'une formation unanime de la Cour, le juge Kasirer vient partiellement casser le jugement (pour être juste avec le juge de première instance, il importe de souligner que certaines des assises de la décision du juge Kasirer n'avaient pas été plaidées en première instance, tel qu'il appert du paragraphe 92 de la décision).  

Après une analyse remarquable de ce qui a amené le législateur à créer le recours prévu à la Loi sur les valeurs mobilières et des objectifs dudit recours, le juge  Kasirer en vient à la conclusion que la communication de la preuve de la partie défenderesse n'est pas possible au stade pré-autorisation:

[93] In any event, the reading of the screening mechanism as a device to protect public issuers, rather than plaintiffs, has been given to the analogous screening mechanisms in securities legislation in other provinces as justification for excluding discovery at this early stage. As a corollary of their reading of legislative intent of the screening provision, courts have held, in respect of disputes as to how evidence may be adduced prior to leave, that the defendant issuers are not required to assist plaintiffs in securing evidence because that would risk undermining the protection against strike suits and amplifying the scope of the proceedings to the equivalent of a mini-trial. This has included circumstances, analogous to the present case, in which a plaintiff was refused document disclosure using a request to inspect documents under the applicable law of procedure. Forcing a defendant to produce evidence would involve time and costs and would potentially prompt “fishing expeditions” undertaken in the hope of finding some document that would justify leave. Particularly useful in this regard is the judgment of Lax, J. of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, in Ainslie:

[15] This submission ignores the legislative purpose of s. 138.8 [the equivalent of s. 225.4 of the Quebec statute]. The section was not enacted to benefit plaintiffs or to level the playing field for them in prosecuting an action under Part XXIII.1 of the Act. Rather, it was enacted to protect defendants from coercive litigation and to reduce their exposure to costly proceedings. No onus is placed upon proposed defendants by s. 138.8. Nor are they required to assist plaintiffs in securing evidence upon which to base an action under Part XXIII.1. The essence of the leave motion is that putative plaintiffs are required to demonstrate the propriety of their proposed secondary market liability claim before a defendant is required to respond. Section 138.8(2) must be interpreted to reflect this underlying policy rationale and the legislature's intention in imposing a "gatekeeper mechanism".

[94] This position has been taken on various occasions by courts in Ontario, including in instances where courts have said that allowing a discovery-like inquiry at this stage would undermine this same legislative intention. In holding that there should be no discovery at this stage, courts outside Quebec have decided that while the procedure in a province may allow for cross-examination on affidavits, “the application remains an initial hurdle and not a substitute for the trial”. The fear is that by allowing discovery, a plaintiff will fish for documents that might support a suit or simply coerce the issuer into a protracted dispute, prompting a possible settlement that the ordinary rule against strike suits would not allow. 

[95] There is every reason to believe, to paraphrase Lax, J. in Ainslie, that the Quebec screening mechanism was not enacted to level the playing field for plaintiffs and that it should be interpreted so that defendant issuers are not required to assist plaintiffs in securing evidence upon which he or she might base a secondary market civil action. This is because the Quebec statute, as a matter of substantive securities law, reflects the same legislative policy as that in Ontario, having been based on the initiatives leading up to and including the Allen Report, and the addition, some years later, of the screening mechanism proposal by the CSA. This included the decision of law reformers to set aside the Ontario 1982 proposal to include the possibility of discovery at the leave stage. Like in Ontario – to quote Justice Lax once more –, “the ‘gatekeeper provision’ was intended to set a bar. The bar would be considerably lowered if the plaintiffs’ view is correct”. In other words, the integrity of the threshold in section 225.4 might well be compromised if discovery was authorized at the pre-leave stage. Indeed the achievement of the purpose of the screening mechanism, explained recently by Côté, J. in Green, as reflecting an “overriding policy concern […] for long-term shareholders, who are unfairly affected by the volatility of share prices that results from spurious claims”, requires that unmeritorious actions be screened out “as early as possible in the litigation process”. 

[96] In his review of the workings of section 225.4 in Theratechnologies, Gascon, J.A. quoted from the proceedings of the Commission permanente des finances publiques of the National Assembly that recalled how the Quebec screening mechanism is substantively identical to that applicable in the rest of Canada:

[89] À ce chapitre, ce mécanisme de filtrage répond à des impératifs propres à une réalité connue du législateur et à laquelle il se dit sensible. L'un des objectifs avoués est d'éviter à un marché vulnérable aux pressions indues les coûts élevés de recours opportunistes. Le sous-ministre adjoint au ministère des Finances l'affirme clairement lors des débats parlementaires précédant l'adoption du nouveau régime:

[…] On simplifie le recours en dommages-intérêts, mais il y a une procédure qui doit être suivie parce qu'il faut s'assurer qu'il n'y aura pas toutes sortes de recours frivoles, d'une part. Il faut aussi en même temps faire l'équilibre entre les demandeurs et les défendeurs sur le marché. Mais ce qu'il faut comprendre, c'est que cette mécanique-là, la procédure, elle va être identique dans tout le Canada. Donc, il est bien important qu'ici, au Québec, la procédure soit la même que dans le reste du Canada. Si des acquéreurs de titres d'émetteurs pancanadiens prennent un recours au Québec, il faut que la procédure soit la même que celle qui va être suivie en Ontario ou dans d'autres provinces du Canada. 

[...]

[97] It is plain that the Quebec rules were designed to be harmonized with the provincial securities legislation elsewhere as a matter of substantive law – not surprising considering the nature of secondary markets for securities in Canada. Commenting the legislative policy underpinning changes to the Quebec statute in 2007, Professor Stéphane Rousseau wrote that the law was strongly inspired by the proposal from the national CSA: “le recours [québécois] témoigne de la volonté du législateur d’assurer l’harmonisation – voire l’uniformisation – des règles régissant la responsabilité civile sur le marché secondaire”. 

[98] The motion judge was of course right to say that the Ontario rules and those in Quebec are not identical. But as Côté, J. noted in Green, these differences do not affect the threshold the plaintiff must meet. While Ontario’s Securities Act is explicit, for example, on the affidavit evidence to be filed, and the right to cross-examine the affiant, both Quebec and Ontario share the same ultimate understanding that the leave hearing should not be a “mini-trial” as Abella, J., wrote in respect of section 225.4. 

[99] What about the explanations offered by the motion judge to justify the rule allowing document disclosure in Quebec?  

[100] The judge observed, quite correctly, that the Act does not speak directly to whether document discovery is available in anticipation of the hearing under section 225.4. On the strength of that “silence”, he fell back on the general rules of civil procedure, including the general provision on pre-trial discovery and disclosure in article 221 C.C.P., as well as rules applicable to class actions, to fill the gap in the Securities Act. He did so on the strength of his reading of the Preliminary Provision of the Code of Civil Procedure which provides that the rules in the Code are to “be interpreted in the light of the specific provisions it contains or of those of the law, and in the matters it deals with, the Code compensates for the silence of the other laws if the context so admits” (“il supplée au silence des autres lois si le contexte le permet”). 

[101] In my respectful view, the judge used supplementary rules of procedure in a manner that is inconsistent with the policy of section 225.4.  

[102] As a code in the civilian tradition, the Code of Civil Procedure has, to be sure, a suppletive vocation for other legislation and, as a code, it plays a role in Quebec law unlike statements of the law of procedure elsewhere. That said, when a judge is confronted with silence in a statute on a procedural matter, the Code cannot compensate for that silence with a rule that undermines legislative intent of the statute itself. The Preliminary Provision says that it operates to complete a statute “if the context so admits / si le context le permet”. The Code supplements the law, it does not supplant it. The law of procedure in Quebec remains adjectival; procedure is, of course, the servant of justice and the law and cannot not, in the instant case, stand as a substitute for or contradict substantive rules of securities legislation. 

[103] While the Securities Act is silent on the specific issue as to whether document discovery is possible at the pre-leave stage, the substantive legislative purpose that underpins section 225.4 is incompatible with it. 

[104] The motion judge wrote that article 20 C.C.P., as a guiding principle of procedure, required the appellant Amaya to cooperate with the respondents’ request for disclosure. Indeed, he was not wrong to say, relying on the Commentaires de la ministre de la Justice, that this rule is connected to “la communication de la preuve”, and he rightly observed that, on its own, article 20 does not create an independent right to disclosure. He proposed however to read article 20 in conjunction with the general rule on discovery in article 221 C.C.P. as a basis for allowing discovery under section 225.4 of the Act in the absence of a rule to the contrary (paras. [52] and [53]). He added that in connection with a class action, articles 571 and 574 C.C.P. direct that the court may allow relevant evidence to be submitted. He used these provisions to fill the “silence” on the issue as to whether discovery was permissible and decided, as a matter of fairness, that the respondents were entitled to document Disclosure. 

[105] None of the provisions cited, alone or grouped with the others, justifies allowing discovery in a manner that would amount to a change in the policy underlying section 225.4 of the Act. Importantly, it is not “unfair” to require a plaintiff-shareholder to show, according to the terms of the screening mechanism, that his or her proposed action is not a strike suit given the policy behind that rule to protect issuers, innocent shareholders, the markets and the courts. On the other hand, it would potentially be unfair to the issuer and to innocent shareholders, as well as to the justice system, to subject the parties to a “mini-trial” that might result if discovery was allowed. When section 225.4, paragraph 3, refers to the requirement that the putative plaintiff show “a reasonable possibility that it [i.e. the proposed action in the annexed projected statement of claim] will be resolved in favour of the plaintiff”, the legislature refers to a reasonable possibility of that outcome at a trial down the road, one at which, where appropriate, discovery can be sought. At this stage, however, the evidentiary bar is lower than at trial – just some credible evidence to support the view that the suit is not destined to fail.  

[106] In support of his extension of rules of documentary discovery to this stage of the case, the motion judge wrote that rules in the new Code of Civil Procedure, in particular the injunction to parties to cooperate in article 20, show that “the Quebec legislature is interested in promoting the early search for the truth rather than postponing it for procedural or other reasons” (para. [49]). In my respectful view, the abstract value of the search for truth cannot neutralize the rule of substantive law that says that, in summary proceedings, issuers have a right to protection against strike suits.  

[107] Moreover, I think it was inappropriate to rely on rules concerning what evidence can be adduced in a class action to solve this problem that arose in the pre-leave stage under section 225.4 of the Act. As noted, the leave requirement under the Securities Act and the authorization requirements for class action are distinct. Here, the debate had nothing to do with the collective character of the claim. Whatever the vocation of article 574 C.C.P. prior to authorization in a class action, it cannot be invoked to sustain a request for document discovery in the present context. 

[108] Finally, I disagree with the motion judge’s view that it would be unfair to hold the leave hearing without the respondents having the benefit of document disclosure. A motion judge seized of an application for leave brought under section 225.4 knows that, in a summary setting, the merits of the dispute will not be fully aired. That judge can therefore take into account the limited opportunity a plaintiff-shareholder has to adduce evidence. In deciding whether the shareholder has shown a reasonable possibility that his or her action will succeed, a judge should consider, in weighing the evidence for this limited purpose, that the shareholder did not have the benefit of evidence that would come from discovery. As van Rensberg, J. of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice observed in Silver v. Imax Corporation, “[i]n undertaking this evaluation the court must keep in mind that there are limitations on the ability of the parties to fully address the merits because of the motion procedure”. Perrell, J. wrote similarly in Musicians’ Pension Fund of Canada (Trustees of) v. Kinross Gold Corp., that “[t]he court’s weighing of the evidence for the leave test must be tempered by the recognition that there has been no discovery and that the analysis is conducted on a paper record with all its attendant limitations”. In Quebec, the shareholder can bring evidence in support of his or her motion – exhibits or sworn statements for example – but the defendant is not obliged to assist at this stage. In my view the motion for leave pursuant to section 225.4 in this case, as presented with the supporting exhibits, could fairly proceed to hearing without Discovery. 

[109] I note as well the motion judge’s concern that, without document disclosure, plaintiffs will be unfairly placed when seeking to adduce “credible evidence” required of them in the effort to meet the standard of the screening mechanism. It is true, as Abella, J. wrote, that summary adjudication pursuant to section 225.4 involves a “reasoned consideration of the evidence”.  But this does not, in itself, justify forcing the defendant issuer to disclose documents. In keeping with Theratechnologies, a motion judge should weigh the evidence proffered by the plaintiff and, if the defendant has chosen to bring evidence as well, that too should be scrutinized in the summary proceedings envisaged by the legislature. Indeed in Mask v. Silvercorp, decided after both Theratechnologies and Green, Strathy, C.J.O. decided that the “reasonable possibility” leg of the leave test requires scrutiny of merits of the action “based on all the evidence proffered by the parties”. That said, the injunction that the evidence from both sides be weighed at this stage, and the burden that a plaintiff faces to bring credible evidence in support of his or her request for leave, does not in itself justify document discovery.

Suivi:

La Cour suprême du Canada a refusé la permission d'en appeler de cette décision dans Pierre Derome, et al. v. Amaya Inc. (2018 CanLII 73617).

Référence : [2018] ABD 41