Legal Blog

Adjournments

Adjournments are requested too often and granted too easily. Sometimes adjournments are granted without costs to the other party; sometimes they are granted with costs thrown away. Rarely are they refused. Judges do not like to see a party prejudiced because of a problem in attending a court date.

Now and then, however, adjournments are refused. Such was the case in Royal Bank of Canada v. Puzzolanti, a 2018 decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal.

Notice

The bank was attempting to recover $337,000 from a customer who had deposited, and been credited for, a cheque that turned out to be forged. The bank attended a hearing to determine whether the court would allow it to bring a motion for summary judgment; the customer declined to attend. The judge granted the bank the right to bring its motion for summary judgment returnable on a specified date and the bank’s lawyers notified the customer’s lawyers of that date.

The bank then served its materials on the customer’s lawyers and reminded the lawyers of the motion date.

On the day before the motion, it seems that the customer’s new lawyer advised the bank’s lawyers that he had just been retained for the motion and, because he was unavailable to attend on the set motion day, requested an adjournment. The bank’s lawyers refused to grant it and so did the motion judge the next day.

The motion judge granted judgment in favour of the bank.

Appeal

The customer appealed. The Court of Appeal noted that the customer had ample notice of the date for the hearing of the motion and that waiting until the last minute to request an adjournment was contrary to the principles surrounding the adjudication of summary judgment motions, including their role as a “cheaper, faster alternative to a full trial.” The court also noted that the request for the adjournment was contrary to a court practice direction that provided that there be no adjournments of scheduled motions within 2 days of the scheduled hearing date “except in extenuating and exceptional circumstances.”

The court therefore determined that it was not contrary to the interests of justice to proceed with the summary judgment motion and noted that this conclusion was strengthened because, on a plain reading of the statement of defence, the customer offered no tenable defence to the bank’s claim.

Image courtesy of mensatic.

Written by Jonathan Speigel, the founding partner of Speigel Nichols Fox LLP, leads the litigation and construction practices.