Plaintiff's hearing date given away to Defendant lawyer raises more questions of fairness

In an earlier blog post, it was reported that Justice D. Blair Nixon, the current case management judge in the suit against the lawyers and their law firm Gowlings, had informed the parties he was assigned to the trial of another case and was therefore unavailable to hear the plaintiff's scheduled applications on December 15, 2016, and that they would need to be rescheduled.

At that time, the plaintiff's application for the judge's recusal had already been in waiting for one and a half years, and the plaintiff's application for amendments (with further proposed amendments filed later) had been in waiting for three years.

It has now come to light that the plaintiff's long awaited hearing date of December 15, and Justice Nixon's availability, were given away to Taryn Burnett - the lawyer and defendant in this plaintiff's case - so Burnett could use that timeslot and Justice Nixon's availability for her own unrelated trial in which she was defence lawyer. That unrelated trial was scheduled to run from December 5 - 16, 2016.

This new revelation of giving away the plaintiff's court resources to the defendant lawyer for her trial, and Justice Nixon presiding over it, raises issues of partiality and bias and will be added as a new ground to the plaintiff's pending application for recusal. The recusal application is already grounded in another conflict of interest with Justice Nixon.

The other issue is that this resulted in yet another delay in this case plagued with ongoing delays by the court and Gowlings. The chronic delays are extremely unfair to the plaintiff who has a right to have her claims resolved in a timely manner.

Not surprisingly, Gowlings has recently added a new delay of its own: On December 12, 2016 the Privacy Commissioner denied Gowlings' application to ignore the plaintiff's access request seeking her credit and financial information, and ordered Gowlings to respond to it, as reported in this earlier blog post. But, on January 12 Gowlings informed the plaintiff it would delay its response for an additional 30 days, which all too conveniently avoids their impending privacy breach disclosures from being referenced in the plaintiff's court brief for amendments by its filing deadline.