Litigation with the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA)

Decisions involving ACOA












Home | Facts about the ACOA litigation, cont. | The Appeal | The Destruction of Documents by ACOA | Background | Decisions involving ACOA





Some trials and hearings and how they portray the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency














"It appears that, because of ACOA's involvement, she had made assumptions at the beginning before bidding on the contract, regarding the "safety" of the project, which were not justified. However, when Mrs. Cruickshank became concerned and made her inquiries of ACOA around mid August, she received representations and assurances which were not accurate and which were misleading and can only be classified as negligent in light of the true state of affairs with the NsC Diesel funding arrangements. She unquestionably relied on these representations to their company's detriment, at least to the extent of the $105,000.00 worth of materials delivered after the negligent misrepresentations to her."

Justice Boudreau in Seabord Construction Inc. v. Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, 1995 CanLII 4444 (NS S.C.)

"In total, ACOA sustained losses of over $2.5 million in the Nova Pak project. . . .
 
. . . In total, ACOA sustained losses of almost $200,000 as a result of loans granted to Cardinal Packaging Ltd."
 

The case of Canada v. Canada resulted from ACOA's refusal to honor an Information Act request from a reporter, which caused the Information Commissioner to sue the Agency. The Information Commissioner ultimately succeeded on appeal.

Canada (Information Commissioner) v. Canada (Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency), 1999 Federal Court of Appeal

See also the report from the Information Commissioner here

The series of trials involving Granitile ultimately ended with the Ontario court finding of fraud, involving a complex scheme to manufacture documents. However, the Granitile proceedings also showed ACOA as an agency with questionable knowledge or control over its own document retention practices.
 
"[105]       Joe Wild was clear in his evidence in this proceeding.  The concern was that the problem of missing documents was relevant to the claim for punitive damages."
 

"[52]   I begin by looking at the corporate purposes granted to ACOA by it enabling Act.  Section 4 states its purpose is to support economic activity in Atlantic Canada and to do so it is enabled by Section 13 to make loans to small and medium sized enterprises.  It is an agent of Her Majesty, in right of Canada.   It has the task to carry out the will of the Federal Government to assist in economic development in Atlantic Canada.   It lends money on terms which might not be otherwise available.  It is thus understandable that the structure of its loans may have elements not normally found in usual commercial loans, but rather elements designed to better enable it to carry out its purpose.  The use of the word “contribution” in the documentation may be because it better describes what is being provided than would the usual word “loan”.

[53]   ACOA was loaning money or making  contributions knowing that the prescribed percentage of NovaLIS’ net revenue may well not be sufficient to repay the provisional contributions  by June 2014.   That may be why they are called “provisional”.   It may have been more concerned with NovaLIS being in business during that time than with having the contributions repaid in full.  But on the other hand it provided that, if  NovaLIS were in default, it wanted the balance, or whatever part of it it may determine, to be owing.  The possible penalty of full repayment would discourage NovaLIS from simply abandoning its projects."

NovaLis Technologies (Re) NSSC 222, 2008

















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