The B.C. Court of Appeal will allow a class action brought by the province against opioid manufacturers to proceed, calling the companies’ repeated attempts to relitigate the class certification “unhelpful.”
David Eby, then B.C.’s attorney general, filed the lawsuit in 2018 against opioid manufacturers to recover the health-care costs associated with the drugs’ alleged overprescription and the nationwide addiction crisis that ensued.
Chief amongst the claims is that manufacturers promoted the use of opioids for conditions for which they were not suitable, such as chronic pain.
A Supreme Court judge had certified this as a class action, allowing it to proceed with the province acting as a representative plaintiff on behalf of all of Canada’s provincial, territorial and federal governments. The group of companies — more than 40 are named in the suit — appealed.
But a three-judge panel unanimously upheld the lower court’s decision in a Wednesday (June 24) judgment, finding that the companies were seeking to reweigh evidence to arrive at a different result, which is not the purpose of an appeal.
The justices find that the lower court was not only correct procedurally and jurisdictionally, but that this is just the type of case the class action system was designed to facilitate.
The B.C. government expects the trial will now begin on schedule, with arguments commencing on Feb. 22, 2028. The court has set aside 80 days to hear the case.
B.C.’s claim relies on the 2018 Opioid Damages and Health Care Costs Recovery Act, which was created to allow the province to pursue this type of litigation.
The province alleges that going back to 1996, “the defendants acted in an industry-wide, systemic, and coordinated fashion, which has caused or contributed to a health crisis and burdened the provincial and territorial health care systems with substantial costs.”
This is not the first appeal decision in the case’s long road toward trial.
“The certification application and the subsequent appeals are examples of the unhelpful and disproportionate overcomplication of what should be a relatively straightforward inquiry brought early in a proceeding,” the judges write in the reasons for judgment.
The justices add that this sort of appeal can “undermine the important goals of class action proceedings — judicial economy and access to justice.”