Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Ownership and beneficial entitlement to the Fort St. John property was clearly in Cameo Farms Ltd., with no proven beneficial interest in favour of the defendants.

• The defendants’ asserted right to occupy the property depended entirely on a purported 99-year “Tenancy Agreement” lease in favour of Janet Kelly Baldwin.

• The court found the alleged lease did not effectively convey an interest in land because it was expressed as a lease by Doris Baldwin personally, even though Cameo Farms Ltd. was the actual registered owner at the time.

• Serious reliability and authenticity concerns surrounded the lease: no witness to Doris’s signature, limited evidence she received legal advice, and multiple subsequent documents and complaints by Doris and Jerry that were inconsistent with any long-term lease.

• The court relied on hearsay evidence from the now-deceased Doris and Jerry Baldwin (through their children and contemporaneous records), finding it generally necessary and reliable, and concluding that any right to occupy ended no later than January 1, 2008.

• While Cameo obtained declarations of ownership, possession and related enforcement orders (plus costs), its separate claim for occupational rent of $5,000 was dismissed for lack of evidentiary foundation.

Facts and background

The plaintiff, Cameo Farms Ltd., is a British Columbia company that owns a 20.6-acre property in Fort St. John (the “Property”), which had originally been acquired by Doris and/or Jerry Baldwin in 1977 and transferred into Cameo’s name in 1987. Doris ultimately became the sole shareholder of Cameo in 1992 and remained so until her death in 2015, shortly before Jerry also passed away. Doris and Jerry had five children: Laurie Jean Baptist, Wesley Baldwin, Diane Klassen, Linda Gillespie, and the defendant, Janet Kelly (Janet Kelly Baldwin, also known as Kelly Baldwin). Following Doris’s death, Laurie Jean Baptist was appointed executor and trustee of Doris’s estate, and all of Doris’s shares in Cameo were transferred to the executor, who became the sole director of Cameo. The defendants, Janet Kelly Baldwin and her partner Paul Williams, have been occupying the Property since Doris’s death. Cameo sought to retake possession, but the defendants refused to vacate. In December 2018, Cameo commenced a civil claim seeking a declaration of ownership, an order for possession, an injunction restraining the defendants from remaining in occupation, and compensation for occupational rent. The matter ultimately proceeded by way of summary trial, in which only the plaintiff appeared; the defendants did not attend, despite having been notified and previously granted adjournments.

Procedural history and summary trial posture

After the notice of civil claim was filed on December 20, 2018, Cameo brought a summary trial application in May 2024. The hearing date had to be rescheduled multiple times due to lack of court time and defence adjournment requests. In the course of these adjournments, the court ordered the defendants to pay $4,000 in costs in any event of the cause. The summary trial was finally heard on August 21, 2025, without appearances by the defendants. The court was satisfied under Rule 9-7 that the record permitted necessary findings of fact and law and that it would not be unjust to decide the issues summarily, especially given the long delay and the narrow, largely documentary nature of the dispute.

The alleged 99-year lease and the parties’ positions

Cameo’s position was that, as registered owner and beneficial owner of the Property, it was entitled to possession and control unless the defendants could show a valid right to occupy. The defendants’ entire claim to continued occupation rested on a document titled “TENANCY AGREEMENT” dated June 26, 2005, which they asserted was a 99-year lease (the “Lease”) from Cameo to Janet Kelly Baldwin for $1 per month, allowing her to assign the lease to her descendants. That document referred to Doris Baldwin personally (“I DORIS ALETHA BALDWIN agree to lease my property…”) and bore a signature purporting to be Doris’s. The defendants argued this conferred a long-term leasehold interest in Janet’s favour. Cameo disputed the Lease’s validity and authenticity, contending that Doris lacked authority to lease because Cameo, not Doris, owned the Property in 2005, and pointing to later documents and complaints by Doris and Jerry that were inconsistent with any long-term lease.

Evidence of Doris and Jerry Baldwin and the hearsay framework

Because Doris and Jerry were deceased, their evidence reached the court indirectly through their children’s affidavits and contemporaneous records, such as police complaints, tenancy documents, and medical notes. Applying the principled approach to hearsay, the court considered necessity and threshold reliability. The evidence was necessary because the key actors were deceased. It was generally reliable because it was consistent with their conduct at the time, recorded in writing for purposes unrelated to this lawsuit, often made to persons in authority (such as the RCMP and the Residential Tenancy Branch), and arose in the context of marital separation negotiations where the spouses’ interests diverged. However, the court declined to rely on the children’s evidence that Doris later denied the Lease’s existence or denied signing it, given medical evidence of her dementia and susceptibility to influence and the fact that this denial was being advanced by children with an interest in invalidating the Lease. The balance of Doris’s and Jerry’s hearsay evidence was accepted and used to assess whether any genuine lease existed.

Inconsistencies between the alleged lease and later conduct

The court found multiple factual features undermining the validity and authenticity of the Lease. First, in 2006, when Doris and Jerry pursued a marital separation, both had legal counsel, and the Property was their most significant asset, yet communications between counsel about property division contained no mention of any 99-year lease in favour of Janet. Second, in May 2007, Doris, acting expressly as owner of Cameo, executed a short-term “Tenancy Agreement” granting Paul Williams the right to live on the Property (in an abandoned bus) and store his possessions until January 1, 2008, in exchange for labour. If Janet already held a 99-year lease, there would have been no need for Doris to grant Paul a separate time-limited occupational arrangement. Third, in February 2008, after that short-term arrangement had ended, Doris and Jerry complained to the RCMP that Janet and Paul had “no right or permission to be on the acreage,” that they had never paid rent or storage fees, and that the couple should “vacate the premises immediately”. This was flatly inconsistent with any belief that Janet held a long-term leasehold interest. Fourth, in March 2008 Doris and Jerry issued a 10-day notice to end tenancy to Paul and Janet under the Residential Tenancy Act, leading to an RTB hearing where an order of possession issued against Paul. At that hearing, Janet claimed to have a long-term lease but did not produce any lease document; the RTB officer noted the lease had not been provided and therefore made no determination on it. None of Doris’s other children had previously heard of the Lease. Only after the RTB proceedings did Janet attempt to register the Lease against title, signing Land Title documents as an “authorized signatory” for Cameo despite having no such authority; the Land Title Office rejected the registration. The court viewed the late and selective emergence of the Lease, coupled with the subsequent failure to register it promptly and the lack of any contemporaneous reliance on it in 2005–2008, as serious red flags.

Validity of the lease and right to occupy

On the face of the document, the court held that the Lease did not validly convey a leasehold interest in the Property. As of June 26, 2005, the registered owner was Cameo Farms Ltd., and Doris personally had no capacity in her own right to lease out the Property. The Lease language framed the grant as Doris leasing “my property” to Janet, but in law the land belonged to Cameo. There was also no evidence that Doris signed the document as an authorized representative of Cameo, no witness attesting to her signature, and no indication that a lawyer had prepared or witnessed the Lease. Although Janet claimed Doris consulted a lawyer about it, the available correspondence suggested that no lease was prepared or executed in that lawyer’s presence. Given the burden on the defendants to prove the Lease’s authenticity and valid execution, and in light of the numerous later documents and actions by Doris and Jerry treating Janet and Paul as having only limited or no right to be on the land, the court was not persuaded the Lease was genuinely executed on its stated date or otherwise valid. The court therefore concluded that the defendants had no subsisting right to occupy the Property and that any permissive occupation ended at the latest on January 1, 2008, when the limited Tenancy Agreement with Paul Williams expired.

Outcome, remedies and costs

The court granted Cameo Farms Ltd. the relief it sought in relation to ownership and possession. It declared that Cameo is the owner of the Property in fee simple, found that the purported 99-year Lease is not a valid or enforceable lease, and ordered that the defendants, Janet Kelly Baldwin and Paul Williams (or any other occupants), must deliver vacant possession of the Property to Cameo within 30 days. If the defendants or any occupants fail to remove their personal property within that period, Cameo is permitted to dispose of the remaining items and may recover any costs incurred in enforcing the order. The court considered that a separate injunction restraining the defendants from remaining in possession was unnecessary in light of the mandatory possession order. Cameo also sought $5,000 by way of occupational rent, but the court dismissed that claim because there was no evidence establishing an appropriate rental amount or basis for quantification. As the successful party, Cameo was awarded its costs of the action against the defendants, in addition to the earlier $4,000 in costs ordered on an adjournment. The result is that Cameo, as the corporate owner, successfully recovered legal possession and control of the Property, while the defendants’ reliance on the alleged long-term lease failed, and no monetary award for occupational rent was made.