Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Scope of an urban planning expert’s role and whether interpreting and applying municipal zoning and planning bylaws crosses into impermissible legal opinion reserved to the judge.
• Characterization of expert evidence on municipal regulations as assistance on planning context versus an attempt to answer the ultimate legal questions in dispute.
• Application of the leave-to-appeal criteria under arts. 31 and 241 C.p.c. to interlocutory rulings excluding or trimming expert reports.
• Assessment of whether excluding parts of the urbanist’s reports causes irreparable prejudice to the plaintiffs’ case or merely confines the expert to proper technical evidence.
• Alleged jurisprudential “controversy” over a strict versus more liberal approach to admissibility of urban planning expert opinions and whether this warrants appellate clarification in this case.
• Allocation of costs at the leave stage, with both applications for permission to appeal dismissed with costs but without any quantified monetary amount specified.

Facts and background

Autocar Royal inc. is a school transportation company that acquired a property in 2024 in the territory of the Ville de Saint-Lazare with the intention of parking its school buses there. The municipality took the position that using the land as a bus parking facility was not a permitted use under its municipal planning and zoning framework. On that basis, it refused to issue a certificate of occupancy authorizing the intended operation. Autocar Royal inc., together with 9505-7154 Québec inc. and Gestion Astuce inc., commenced proceedings in the Superior Court seeking to compel the City to issue the necessary authorization or, alternatively, to obtain a declaration that they benefited from acquired rights permitting the proposed use notwithstanding current regulations. To support their position, the plaintiffs filed an expert report prepared by an urban planner. That report examined the applicable planning instruments, including the regional land use plan (schéma d’aménagement), the zoning bylaw and interim control regulation (règlement de contrôle intérimaire), and addressed how these instruments should be understood in relation to the plaintiffs’ project. The report did not simply describe the regulatory framework; it advanced detailed conclusions about how the municipal rules should be interpreted and applied to the plaintiffs’ situation, including the classification of uses and whether the bus parking operation was in fact authorized. The City moved before the Superior Court to strike the first report on the basis that it was not proper expert planning evidence but an impermissible legal opinion that usurped the adjudicative role reserved to the court. Parallel to filing an application for permission to appeal that first interlocutory ruling, the plaintiffs commissioned and filed a second report from the same urban planner. This second report attempted to respond to the criticisms of the first, but still contained sections (notably sections 2.5 and 2.6) that squarely addressed the ultimate questions in dispute, such as whether the zoning bylaw and interim control regulation permitted the proposed school bus use. In response, the City again brought a motion challenging portions of the new expert report.

The Superior Court decisions

Two interlocutory decisions of the Superior Court lay behind the eventual Court of Appeal ruling. In the first, rendered on 7 February 2025 by Justice Ian Demers, the judge granted the City’s motion and rejected the plaintiffs’ first expert report in its entirety. Justice Demers accepted the municipality’s argument that the urban planner’s report did not confine itself to technical planning expertise but instead conducted the very legal analysis reserved to the judge: reviewing the land use planning scheme, examining the role and scope of the interim control regulation, parsing the zoning bylaw and classification of uses, and directly critiquing the City’s interpretation. In particular, the judge noted that the expert expressly framed parts of his report as a demonstration of why the City’s legal interpretation “could not be retained,” thus mirroring the reasoning exercise expected of the trial judge rather than offering contextual or technical expertise. As a result, the report was found inadmissible as expert evidence and was struck. After that ruling, the plaintiffs produced a second expert report by the same urban planner. The City again challenged this report, arguing that sections 2.5 and 2.6 continued to offer legal conclusions on the very questions in issue: whether, in light of the plan d’urbanisme, surrounding urban context and applicable regulations, the zoning bylaw and interim control regulation authorized the intended school transportation use on the site. In a second interlocutory judgment dated 20 August 2025, Justice Luc Morin partially granted the City’s request. Justice Morin ordered that sections 2.5 and 2.6 be removed from the report but allowed the plaintiffs to file the balance of the report (sections 2.1 to 2.4), which the judge considered to be within the proper scope of planning expertise. The judge characterized the impugned parts of the report as offering a legal interpretation of the applicable regulation tailored to the factual and legal parameters of the dispute, rather than providing technical planning insight to assist the court. By contrast, the earlier sections were seen as containing background and contextual planning analysis that could legitimately assist the trial judge without displacing their decision-making function.

Applications for leave to appeal

The plaintiffs sought leave to appeal both interlocutory decisions to the Quebec Court of Appeal. For the judgment rendered under article 241 C.p.c., the applicable criteria were those in article 31 C.p.c. The applicants had to demonstrate that the interlocutory order either decided part of the dispute or caused irreparable prejudice, and that the proposed appeal raised a question meriting the Court’s attention, had reasonable prospects of success, and was consistent with the guiding principles of civil procedure. In challenging the Demers and Morin rulings, the plaintiffs argued that the judges had misunderstood the nature and admissibility of urban planning expert evidence. They maintained that their expert was operating squarely within his field by identifying and analyzing planning orientations and standards, placing the challenged regulations in their broader planning context, and explaining the structure and relationship between the zoning regulation, the planning scheme and the urban planning bylaw. From their perspective, this kind of interpretive work did not usurp the court’s role but assisted the judge in understanding complex planning instruments and situating the City’s position within that framework. The plaintiffs also pointed to the fact that the City’s key witness was herself an urban planner and argued that, if their expert’s legal-tinged planning analysis were excluded, the City would retain an unfair advantage, as its urbanist could offer opinions on issues their expert would be barred from addressing. They further contended that there existed a jurisprudential debate about whether the admissibility of urban planning evidence should be approached more strictly or more liberally. Citing a line of Quebec Superior Court cases where judges had declined to exclude urbanists’ reports containing opinions on the applicability of municipal regulations, they urged the Court of Appeal to clarify the standard and adopt a more nuanced approach that would accommodate the particular nature of planning expertise.

Court of Appeal’s analysis

Sitting as a single judge, Justice Peter Kalichman of the Quebec Court of Appeal dismissed both applications for leave to appeal. On the question of reasonable chances of success, the judge found that the applicants had not shown that the Superior Court judges misunderstood the context in which urban planning expert evidence may be admitted. He noted that Justice Morin had in fact allowed a significant portion of the second report (sections 2.1 to 2.4), which supported the view that the judge had carefully distinguished between legitimate planning expertise and impermissible legal opinion. According to the Court of Appeal, the problem only arose when the expert stepped into the judge’s role by addressing, in sections 2.5 and 2.6, the very questions the court itself had to decide—namely, whether the zoning bylaw and interim control regulation authorized the proposed bus parking use. Justice Kalichman underscored that these sections explicitly framed the issues as the ultimate legal questions and offered direct answers to them, thereby creating a “perfect overlap” between the expert’s opinion and the judicial determination to be made at trial. In that context, it was open to the Superior Court judges to confine the expert’s participation to admissible planning evidence that informed, but did not displace, the judge’s legal reasoning. On the alleged need for appellate clarification, the Court of Appeal was not convinced that the authorities cited by the plaintiffs revealed a true controversy or conflict of approaches requiring intervention in this case. While recognizing that some Superior Court decisions had declined to exclude urbanists’ reports even where they touched on the applicability of legislation or municipal regulations, Justice Kalichman interpreted those rulings as applications of a general principle of prudence in dealing with expert evidence, rather than markers of a doctrinal split. He left open the possibility that, in an appropriate future case, the Court of Appeal might examine whether the peculiar nature of urban planning practice justifies a somewhat more flexible stance on expert opinions that brush against legal questions. However, he concluded that this case was not the proper vehicle for such an exercise, particularly given the direct alignment between the expert’s opinions on sections 2.5 and 2.6 and the precise ultimate issues to be decided by the trial judge. The Court further rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that they would suffer irreparable prejudice because the City’s urbanist would testify while their expert was constrained. Justice Kalichman emphasized that the trial judge would be capable of differentiating between what can properly be given as expert evidence and what cannot, and that this judicial control would apply equally to both sides. Moreover, the plaintiffs’ own expert would still testify on the admissible portions of his report, thereby providing useful planning context and analysis within the limits set by the Superior Court.

Outcome and implications

Having found that the proposed appeals lacked reasonable prospects of success, did not raise a question warranting the Court’s attention in this procedural posture, and did not establish irreparable prejudice within the meaning of article 31 C.p.c., the Court of Appeal dismissed both applications for leave to appeal. In file 500-09-700359-250, the application to appeal Justice Demers’s judgment striking the first expert report was rejected with costs. In file 500-09-031685-258, the application to appeal Justice Morin’s decision partially striking sections 2.5 and 2.6 of the second expert report was likewise rejected with costs. The result is that the underlying municipal land use dispute will proceed in the Superior Court with the plaintiffs’ urban planning expert limited to the admissible parts of the second report, while the City will be able to call its own urbanist as an ordinary witness to explain the regulatory choices and the rationale for its position. More broadly, the decision underscores the Quebec courts’ insistence that experts, including urban planners, must not answer the ultimate legal questions reserved for the judge, even when their field of expertise is closely intertwined with regulatory interpretation. In this case, the successful party at the appellate stage is the Ville de Saint-Lazare, which successfully resisted both applications for leave to appeal. The Court of Appeal ordered costs against the plaintiffs in each file, but the judgment does not specify or quantify the total monetary amount of those costs, and no damages or other monetary awards were granted in the decision, so the overall amount ordered in the City’s favour cannot be determined from the text of the ruling.