Administrative Tribunal Advocacy and Judicial Review

A regulatory complaint can come from a client, a competitor, an employer or the regulator's own compliance staff, and the source shapes how much of the file the regulator already holds. You write your first response before knowing which allegation will survive, and every sentence in that letter stays on the record. We settle the facts and the chronology with you before you send the letter. On separate files we act for the professional answering a complaint and for the person bringing one.

Under the governing statute, a regulator can compel your practice records and require you to attend an investigative interview. A duty to cooperate with a demand does not oblige you to interpret your own conduct for an investigator. Documents handed over without a review of scope can carry the file well past the allegation the original complaint actually raised, and well past what the regulator first suspected. We sort the material into what must go, what is privileged, and what falls outside the demand, then take you through the questions an investigator is likely to ask.

A regulator can suspend or limit a licence while an investigation is still open on a timetable separate from the complaint. The hearing on an interim order therefore arrives long before anyone tests the underlying allegation, and the material filed for that hearing is often the first account a decision maker reads. We answer that material without waiting for the merits, and press for terms narrow enough to let you keep working.

A citation fixes what the panel will decide. The wording of the allegations sets the hearing's boundary. The hearing on that citation produces the only record a reviewing court will ever see. Evidence nobody calls there is ordinarily gone by the time a petition reaches the court. We conduct the hearing to that standard, calling the witnesses and putting the questions any later review will have to depend on.

A consent order closes a file without a hearing, but the order remains a disciplinary one and appears on the register alongside anything a panel would have imposed. In practice, the terms reach further than the reprimand people expect. A competency assessment, a period of supervised practice, or an undertaking capping the categories of work you take on can each form part of the bargain. We test whether the regulator can prove the allegation before we advise you to accept any term.

Regulators separate orders that leave a licence intact from orders that limit, suspend or cancel the licence, and the difference governs how hard the penalty stage has to be fought. Where the order is a reprimand or a required course of study, your practice keeps running. An order in the second group fixes how long you must wait before applying for reinstatement. Our lawyers argue that period while penalty is still open.

You can challenge a refusal, a condition on registration, or a delay long enough to stop you working. When a health college makes an adverse decision after a hearing, the file goes to the Health Professions Review Board. We assemble the proof of qualification and current standing before the file opens, then appear on any review.

Not every dispute belongs to the tribunal that has taken the dispute on, and jurisdiction is worth testing first. We raise that objection at the outset, before a panel spends days on evidence.

A tribunal must disclose what the panel relies on before the hearing. Material that arrives late, or never arrives at all, raises a fairness point you must take at the time, because a point never taken cannot be argued afterwards. We press for disclosure early and put the objection on the record when a panel admits late material.

Tribunals are generally not bound by the rules of evidence that govern a courtroom. Relaxed admissibility widens what a panel may hear, so hearsay and untested opinion arrive alongside your own records. We prepare witnesses, cross-examine and order the documents so a panel can follow at first reading.

The reasons a panel gives are what a court later measures against the evidence heard. A proposition never put to the panel leaves a court nothing to review, however strong the proposition might have been. Our submissions ask the panel for a finding on each point. The decision then deals with each point or visibly does not.

You bring judicial review by petition in the Supreme Court of British Columbia rather than by appeal. We advise on the merits in a timely manner. Across our files we appear for petitioners and, in other matters, for parties defending a decision.

A petition succeeds in a defect in how the decision maker reached the result, not on a preference for another outcome, and the two are easy to confuse when the result feels wrong. Procedural unfairness, a finding the record cannot carry, and a panel acting without jurisdiction are separate grounds answering separate tests. We plead only the grounds the record will carry, because a weak ground invites a court to treat the strong one as more of the same.

Filing a petition does not suspend the decision under review. A suspension or a cancellation keeps operating while the court's file moves, and a statutory appeal sits in the same position. Because of that, a stay requires a separate application, argued on the balance of convenience. We bring that application alongside the petition.

Some decisions carry a statutory right of appeal; some carry only judicial review, and a small number carry both routes. The windows differ, so the wrong route can cost you the right one. We identify the route the enabling Act provides, and where a tribunal holds a power to reconsider, we file that request before the appeal period runs out.

Many decisions go to an internal review before a court sees the file at all. The Health Professions Review Board reviews how a college disposed of a complaint, an adverse registration decision, and the time a college took to reach either one. The complaint-disposition route belongs to the complainant rather than the registrant, and we are instructed on internal reviews by either kind of client.

One event can put more than one licence in issue, because a professional registered in another province commonly has to report a finding to everybody holding that registration. The same file also touches a civil claim over the same conduct, an employer's own process, and an insurer deciding coverage. We coordinate the position taken in each forum, so that an admission made to satisfy one regulator does not settle a question nobody has yet asked in another.