For almost fifty years, John, who immigrated to the United States when he was very young, operated a dealership in the Midwest. He sold merchandise made exclusively by one of the biggest and most familiar manufacturers in United States history (the ʺManufacturerʺ). John was an extremely popular dealer who won sales awards in almost all categories. He was a true American success story. Late in his career, John was asked – purportedly by the local representative for the Manufacturerʹs computer service division (whom John had known and dealt with for years) and as part of the overall obligations and expectations...

Modern provincial superior courts throughout Canada are the primary public venues in which Canadians resolve their disputes.¹ The system ispublicin the sense that it is largely funded by governments (through taxpayer money), is – at least in theory – potentially available to all people for all disputes, is open to the public and the press, and provides judgments that are of interest not just to disputing parties but also to society as a whole. I say in theory because formallyopencourts may be; widelyaccessiblethey are not. As the Irish judge Sir James Mathew reportedly stated...

As a basic starting point, privatization, broadly defined, is any shift from the public to the private. In theory, privatization can involve a number of different contexts, including, for example, an increased preference to keep personal or family issues away from public scrutiny, transforming a company from a publicly traded corporation to a privately held asset, or downloading government services to a private service provider. In the latter sense, privatization, generally speaking, involves shifting the provision of government services or assets to various non-state (for-profit) entities. In this sense, ʺgovernmentʺ is being equated with ʺpublicʺ and ʺnon-stateʺ is being equated...

Over the years, administrative tribunals and related regimes¹ have developed largely as alternative, specialized dispute resolution forums. As Kaye Joachim commented, administrative tribunals ʺwere created to provide a speedy, efficient, and more cost effective alternative to court adjudication.ʺ² Similarly, according to Régimbald, administrative ʺagencies, boards, commissions and tribunals,ʺ which are ʺoften populated by experts in the area,ʺ provide

specialized and technical resolutions to different situations, ensure greater innovation, flexibility and efficiency in the delivery of governmental programs and strategies, provide an informal and rapid forum for public hearings (thereby minimizing time and costs related to litigation before ordinary courts) and...

There are several sources of influence and support for the current civil justice privatization movement and its driving ethos of reform. Because public regulation is a significant focus of this book, a good place to start is with governments. The introduction and encouragement of privatization initiatives in and through the civil, administrative and non-court or administrative-based legislative ADR regimes accord with, and in some cases are part of, general federal and provincial government dispute resolution strategies. These strategies are designed to encourage the privatization of dispute resolution in relation essentially to all activities in which governments are directly or indirectly...

The purpose of much of the first five chapters in this book, and in particular Chapters 3 through 5, was to fairly and comprehensively document the current privatization movement that has engulfed the civil and administrative dispute resolution landscape and to put the arguments in favour of that movement at their highest. Having done that work, I now turn, in this chapter, to look at five specific areas of concern with respect to privatization that are, in my view, equally compelling but much less well documented. In a nutshell, these five concerns include my views that the privatization movement: tends...

The focus of this book is the privatization trajectory of modern civil justice practice and reform. Through this focus of attention, the overall goal of this book is to notice, and in turn to unpack, understand, question, andat timesargue for the redirection of what has become the largely unwavering nature of that civil justice privatization trajectory. However, by calling for a questioning of the trajectory ʺat timesʺ (rather than ʺat all timesʺ or something similarly absolute), I want to make clear, as I stated in the introductory chapter, that my overall goal isnotto do away with...