Tag: E-Discovery

NSCA outlines the “law of redaction”

Exactly when should an entire document be withheld because redaction is not reaonable?

Freedom of information adjudicators have used the concept of “disconnected snippets” to delineate; if redaction would leave a reader with meaningless “disconnected snippets,” entire records can rightly be withheld.

The Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, on August 7th, applied similar logic in determining that a set of affidavits “could not be redacted without sacrificing their intelligibility and therefore the utility of public access.” It therefore held that the affidavits could be sealed in whole in compliance with the necessity component of the test from Sherman Estate.

Notably, the Court reviewed cases that establish a second basis for full record withholding – cost. In Patient X v College of Physicians and Surgeons of Nova Scotia, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court held that redacting a 120-page records would be too “painstaking and prone to error” given it included a significant number of handwritten notes. And in Khan v College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice reached a similar finding given the record requiring redaction was almost 4,500 pages in length, requiring an error prone hunt for (sensitive) patient information.

Back to freedom of information, where costs are passed through to requesters. In Ontario, the norm is to charge through two minutes a page for redaction. Should a premium be chargeable for handwritten records or records that contain very sensitive information?

Dempsey v. Pagefreezer Software Inc., 2024 NSCA 76 (CanLII).

Federal Court of Appeal – litigation database privileged, no production based on balancing

On October 20th, the Federal Court of Appeal set aside an order that required the federal Crown to disclose the field names it had used in its litigation database along with the rules used to populate the fields. It held the order infringed the Crown’s litigation privilege.

The case management judge made the order in a residential schools abuse class action. The Crown had produced approximately 50,000 documents, with many more to come. The plaintiffs sought the fields and rules (and not the data in the fields) to facilitate their review. The case management judge, though acknowledging litigation privilege, judged the fields and rules as less revealing than the data in the fields and ordered production in the name of efficient procedure.

The Court of Appeal held that the case management judge erred because they “subordinated the Crown’s substantive right to litigation privilege to procedural rules and practice principles.” It also held, “a party attempting to defeat litigation privilege must identify an exception to litigation privilege and not simply urge the Court to engage in a balancing exercise on a case-by-case basis.”

Canada v. Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, 2020 FCA 179 (CanLII).