This June, our team will represent our client in two significant appeals. 

First, Chilwin Cheng will appear at the BC Court of Appeal, defending the interests of our client in a complex shareholder dispute and land disputes. The appeal is from a twenty-day trial of two actions heard concurrently over a large neighbourhood-sized residential development.  We have successfully represented this client in the past, achieving several important victories. The appeal involves a case raising important issues about the translation of documents and conversations from Mandarin to English, the inference of terms in a sparsely written contract, and remedies. 

Second, Chilwin Cheng will ask for leave to appeal in a criminal trial result. In September 2023, Chilwin Cheng and Janessa Mason obtained acquittals of all significant charges against two mining company executives in B.C.  Ascendion Law has represented these defendants since 2015, in two trials. We have been through multiple levels of appeal, including the Supreme Court of Canada, and parallel proceedings, also resulting in acquittals. https://info.ascendionlaw.com/blog/significant-acquittals-in-mining-prosecution  

Unfortunately, on appeal, the summary conviction appeal court set aside the acquittals using the powers under s. 686 of the Criminal Code and affirmed the convictions. The proposed appeal engages the interpretation of a regulatory provision appearing in almost all significant regulatory statutes across many different industries, throughout British Columbia, and indeed in nearly all provinces across Canada. 

We continue to hold that this is a watershed case, with BC courts departing significantly from the rest of the country on the issue of secondary liability. Our goal is to convince to the BC Court of Appeal that it needs to align B.C.’s approach with the rest of Canada on this issue.