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).