Supreme Court of Canada denies Alexion leave to appeal
in case challenging constitutionality of PMPRB remedial
powers
On June 28, 2018, the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed
Alexion Pharmaceuticals' application for leave to appeal a
decision of the Federal Court of Appeal (FCA) that dismissed its
challenge to the constitutionality of certain provisions in the
Patent Act relating to the Patented Medicine Prices Review
Board (PMPRB)'s remedial powers: SCC Case No. 37949. The FCA
decision, Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc v Canada (Attorney
General), 2017 FCA 241, was previously reported
here.
Tobacco companies cannot compel production of health
records in British Columbia's lawsuits to recover health care
costs related to tobacco exposure
The province of British Columbia (BC) brought an action
against Philip Morris International and other tobacco manufacturers
to recover health care costs related to treatment of diseases
caused or contributed to by exposure to a tobacco product, pursuant
to the Tobacco Damages and Health Care Costs Recovery Act
(Act). The constitutionality of the Act had
previously been upheld: British Columbia v Imperial Tobacco
Canada Ltd, 2005 SCC 49. On July 13, 2018, the Supreme
Court of Canada (SCC) held that BC could not be compelled to
produce a collection of anonymized health care databases that the
province intended to use to prove causation and damages:
British Columbia v Philip Morris International, Inc, 2018 SCC 36. The SCC held that the
anonymized databases fell within the scope of a subsection of the
Act that excluded from production "health care
records and documents of particular individual insured persons or
the documents relating to the provision of health care benefits for
particular individual insured persons".
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