$8-billion BSE lawsuit heads to Supreme Court

Mar 12, 2024

TORONTO — Lawyers are headed to the Supreme Court in a final attempt to revive an $8-billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of Canadian cattle producers who were damaged by the BSE crisis of two decades ago.

An Ontario Superior Court judge dismissed the lawsuit two years ago, and the Ontario Court of Appeal denied an appeal of that dismissal on Jan. 31, 2024.

“We have instructions to seek leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada,” Duncan Boswell, senior partner with Gowling WLG in Toronto and lead counsel in the suit, told Farmers Forum in a March email. As many as 100,000 people could benefit if they ultimately win the lawsuit.

The lawsuit blames the federal government for a BSE-infected cow that turned up in Alberta in 2003 because, years earlier, Canada allowed importation of cattle from Britain when that country was known to have BSE-infected animals. Consequently, the U.S. and other countries ruinously closed their borders to Canadian beef for years.

The legal odyssey dates back to 2005 when the original claims were heard in four provinces before the suit moved exclusively to Ontario court. In 2005, the U.S. allowed young Canadian cattle, under 30 months of age, back into its marketplace. Other countries shut out Canadian beef for much longer. It was only in 2023 that Japan finally reopened its market fully to Canadian beef.

Source : Farmersforum

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids