Supreme Court dismisses final appeal against Nova Scotia’s injury cap

The Supreme Court of Canada has effectively upheld Nova Scotia’s $2,500 cap on minor auto injury claims.
The Supreme Court on May 27 dismissed leave to appeal a December 2009 decision by the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, which confirmed the constitutionality of the province’s minor injury cap.
The Supreme Court does not give reasons for dismissing a leave to appeal.
That effectively means the end of the line for the Charter challenge against the province’s cap, which has been in play for almost five years.
The Nova Scotia Court of Appeal found that although the cap “disadvantaged” minor injury claimants, in the sense that they could only collect Cdn$2,500 for their types of injuries, the presence of the disadvantage did not necessarily mean discrimination under the Charter.
“It is not enough for the appellants to simply establish that their distinct group is disadvantaged,” Nova Scotia Appeal Court Justice Simon MacDonald wrote. “Instead, to succeed they must go a step further and establish that their disadvantage reflects discrimination.”
In the meantime, the Nova Scotia government has decided not to scrap the minor injury cap, as it had suggested it might do during the province’s election in June 2009.
Instead, it has tripled the ceiling of the cap, from $2,500 to $7,500 – a move that Oliver Wyman Ltd. estimates will increase insurers’ average bodily injury claims costs by 17%. [Nova Scotia’s superintendent of insurance commissioned the Oliver Wyman report.]