Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Scope and nature of civil contempt (outrage au tribunal) in the context of Mareva, Norwich, Anton Piller and pre-judgment seizure orders arising from an alleged misappropriation of about 1.7 million dollars.
• Application and potential limits of section 11(b) of the Canadian Charter (right to be tried within a reasonable time) to civil contempt proceedings in Quebec, and the choice of analytical framework (Jordan vs Morin vs Blencoe/Abrametz).
• Reasonableness of a delay of more than 27 months between the citation for contempt and the hearing of related motions, including attribution of delay between the plaintiffs, the defendant and institutional causes.
• Adequacy and timing of evidentiary disclosure by the plaintiffs in support of the contempt motion, given the high standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt and the requirement for precise, unambiguous allegations.
• Assessment of prejudice to the defendant from delay, including whether the delay compromised trial fairness or caused serious personal or procedural harm sufficient to amount to an abuse of process.
• Determination that, despite an excessive and largely plaintiff-driven delay, the threshold for the “ultimate remedy” of a stay of proceedings was not met, and that the contempt motion should proceed without any award of costs.

Factual background and underlying dispute

The proceedings arise from a broader commercial dispute between Bourse de l’Immobilier Multilogements inc., BIMI Technologies inc., and two individual principals, Nikolaï Ray and Joël Lavoie, as plaintiffs, and their former employee, Christian Bordeleau, along with several related companies and a family trust. The plaintiffs allege that Bordeleau diverted a little over 1.7 million dollars for his own benefit and for the benefit of companies linked to him. This alleged misappropriation of funds led the plaintiffs to seek strong protective measures from the Superior Court of Quebec. On 17 March 2023, the Court, sitting ex parte, issued provisional injunctive orders of several extraordinary types: Mareva (freezing assets), Norwich (disclosure from third parties) and Anton Piller (civil search and seizure), as well as seizure before judgment. These orders were executed on 20 March 2023 and were intended to preserve assets and evidence pending resolution of the underlying civil claims.

Alleged contempt of court and citation to appear

Shortly after these orders were made, the plaintiffs claimed that Bordeleau, having learned of the forthcoming orders before they were executed, deliberately attempted to frustrate them. According to the plaintiffs, on 19 March 2023, he moved at least one asset, a tractor, to place it beyond the reach of seizure and erased digital data. They say this conduct violated section 58 of the Code of Civil Procedure by obstructing the administration of justice and undermining the authority and dignity of the Court, and also breached specific paragraphs of the March 17 judgment that prohibited the sale, transfer or movement of assets, as well as the destruction or withholding of information and digital access credentials. On 25 May 2023, the plaintiffs filed a motion seeking a citation to appear for contempt of court against Bordeleau, supported by two evidentiary exhibits. On 8 June 2023, the Court issued the citation, ordering Bordeleau to appear on 27 June 2023 to enter a plea to the contempt charge. The citation detailed several alleged violations: moving the tractor to avoid seizure, destroying electronic evidence, and failing to comply with the injunction clauses governing asset disposition and provision of information about digital assets.

Procedural history and evolving delay

The procedural history following issuance of the citation is marked by repeated postponements and inactivity. Bordeleau did not appear on the initial report date and also failed to appear at a rescheduled date in July 2023, with no clear record of a new appearance date being set at that time. Counsel correspondence in July and November 2023 shows that the plaintiffs were considering witnesses (including a bailiff and another individual) and were pressing defence counsel to have Bordeleau appear, indicating that by November 2023 he still had not formally entered a plea. At some point later, Bordeleau entered a plea of not guilty to the contempt charge, though neither the parties nor the court file could pinpoint the precise date. Meanwhile, the main civil action progressed under case protocols (protocole de l’instance). A first protocol signed in May 2024 contemplated that the contempt hearing would be set by 30 June 2024, but that did not occur and the parties offered no explanation. Only on 28 October 2024—more than 16 months after the citation—did the plaintiffs file a case management notice aimed at setting the contempt hearing. That triggered case management steps in November 2024, including a direction that the plaintiffs complete disclosure by 8 November 2024 and that the parties complete a joint declaration for the fixing of the hearing by 22 November 2024. The plaintiffs supplied supplemental disclosure on 11 November 2024, adding only one further exhibit: a 14-page judgment dated 27 March 2024. No explanation was given for the late disclosure of this document. Thereafter, in November 2024, defence counsel requested a draft joint declaration for fixing the hearing; the plaintiffs apparently did not respond promptly, contributing to further delay. A second protocol for the main action was signed in January 2025, again stating that the contempt hearing would be set no later than 28 February 2025. On that date, the plaintiffs filed another case management notice asking that the contempt hearing be set. Four days later, on 4 March 2025, Bordeleau responded with his own case management notice, this time seeking a stay of proceedings on the contempt citation, alleging that the elapsed time since the original motion was unreasonable and violated his right under section 11(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to be tried within a reasonable time. A joint declaration on the setting of the contempt hearing was signed on 7 March 2025. It recorded disagreement on sequencing: the plaintiffs wanted Bordeleau’s stay motion decided before the contempt hearing was fixed; Bordeleau preferred that both the stay motion and the contempt hearing be heard consecutively by the same judge, and argued that time continued to run for delay purposes despite the plaintiffs’ case management steps. On 8 April 2025, the Court ruled that the stay motion would be heard first, and that if it was dismissed the same judge would set the dates and parameters for the contempt hearing. The stay motion was ultimately heard on 25 September 2025, more than 27 months after the citation to appear was issued.

Charter arguments and the nature of civil contempt

In his stay motion, Bordeleau relied on section 11(b) of the Charter, which guarantees to any “person charged with an offence” the right to be tried within a reasonable time. He referred to prior Quebec Superior Court decisions, including St-Amour c. Major and Ville de Montréal c. Gestion Tasa inc., which had applied section 11(b) to civil contempt proceedings on the basis that contempt, even in a civil context, has a quasi-penal character. The judgment canvasses the special position of contempt within the Code of Civil Procedure: while embedded in a civil code, contempt retains a public law aspect because it protects the authority of the courts and the administration of justice, and it carries potentially severe sanctions such as punitive fines, community work and even imprisonment. Because contempt can affect liberty, courts have long required strict procedural safeguards: clear and specific notice of the alleged contempt, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and protection against compelling the alleged contemnor to testify. Earlier Supreme Court of Canada authority (notably Videotron) had recognized that some section 11 protections apply to civil contempt and had led to statutory codification of non-compellability in article 61 C.C.P. However, the judge also noted more recent appellate commentary, particularly the Alberta Court of Appeal’s decision in Lymer v. Jonnson, which questioned the application of Charter section 11 protections to purely private civil contempt proceedings where there is no state actor. That court held that imposing full criminal-style constitutional obligations on private parties was not necessary or appropriate, even though meaningful procedural safeguards exist under ordinary law.

Choice of analytical framework for unreasonable delay

Faced with this divided jurisprudence, the judge found it unnecessary to rule definitively on whether section 11(b) strictly applies to civil contempt. He reasoned that even if the Charter did not apply, the Superior Court retained the power to stay proceedings where delay became an abuse of process, relying on articles 51 and following of the Code of Civil Procedure and on the discretionary nature of contempt powers. Thus, whether approached as a Charter question or as an abuse-of-procedure question, the core issue remained whether the delay had become unreasonable. The judge declined to import wholesale the criminal law framework of R. v. Jordan, which sets presumptive ceilings of 18 and 30 months for criminal prosecutions. Those ceilings were crafted for the criminal justice system based on its institutional realities and evidence of systemic delay; there was no evidence of a similar chronic delay problem in civil contempt, and the Supreme Court in Jordan had not contemplated civil contempt when fixing those numerical thresholds. The earlier pre-Jordan framework in R. v. Morin was also seen as too criminal-specific. Instead, the judge drew guidance from administrative law cases dealing with delay and abuse of process, particularly Blencoe v. British Columbia (Human Rights Commission) and Law Society of Saskatchewan v. Abrametz. Those decisions outline a three-part test, in non-criminal contexts, for when delay (even if not undermining the fairness of the hearing) can be so excessive and harmful that it becomes an abuse of process: the delay must be excessive; it must cause serious, direct prejudice; and, viewed in context, it must be so unfair or damaging to the administration of justice that a stay is warranted.

Assessment of delay and conduct of the parties

Applying this adapted framework, the judge first calculated the relevant period from the issuance of the contempt citation on 8 June 2023 up to the anticipated completion of the contempt hearing. The stay motion was heard after more than 27 months of elapsed time, and the contempt hearing itself had still not been scheduled. Although the judge noted that it would have been more efficient to hear the stay motion alongside the contempt merits (which might have permitted a more precise calculation), he nonetheless treated the delay already accrued as the basis for analysis, leaving open the possibility of a renewed stay motion if further delay accrued before the contempt hearing. On the first step—whether delay was excessive—the judge had little difficulty concluding that the more than 20 months that had passed by February 2025, and the 27-plus months by the time of the stay hearing, were clearly excessive. He emphasized that the delay was not attributable to institutional backlogs or to Bordeleau’s tactics. Rather, it largely flowed from the plaintiffs’ lack of diligence. For over 16 months after the citation, the plaintiffs took no procedural steps to advance the contempt motion. Even when they eventually sought case management in October 2024, they had not completed disclosure and only later added a non-voluminous judgment as a third exhibit without explaining why it had not been disclosed earlier. The joint declaration for the hearing was also not completed by the agreed deadline, in part because the plaintiffs did not send a draft when asked. The case management documents showed that the contemplated contempt hearing would be relatively short and straightforward—two days of hearing, only three exhibits, and two witnesses each with about an hour of examination-in-chief—so complexity could not justify the prolonged delay. The judge did acknowledge that Bordeleau shared some duty to move the matter forward and could have triggered earlier case management by his own notices. Nevertheless, the primary responsibility lay with the plaintiffs, who had chosen to launch a serious contempt process but then treated it as secondary to parallel civil litigation.

Prejudice, abuse of process and the refusal of a stay

Despite finding the delay clearly excessive and largely the result of plaintiff-side nonchalance, the judge concluded that the second element under the Blencoe/Abrametz-type analysis—serious prejudice directly caused by the delay—had not been established. Bordeleau had adduced no concrete evidence that the delay had impaired his ability to defend himself, affected witnesses or evidence, or caused him specific personal or reputational harm beyond the inherent stress of pending litigation. His own limited efforts to move the contempt proceeding forward suggested that he did not view the ongoing delay as gravely prejudicial. The judge observed that, in administrative law, serious prejudice is generally a necessary element for a delay-based abuse of process, because otherwise courts would be creating, by judicial fiat, a kind of limitation period. While he left open the possibility that, in an extreme case, a delay could be so outrageous that a stay would be justified even without proven prejudice, he found that threshold was not met here, particularly since Bordeleau had procedural tools available (such as initiating case management) to push the matter along but largely did not use them. Given the absence of demonstrated serious prejudice, the judge did not need to proceed to the third step—whether the delay, in context, was so unfair or damaging to public confidence as to constitute an abuse of process—and did not consider alternative remedies short of a stay. He nonetheless emphasized that a stay of proceedings is the “ultimate remedy” for abuse of process and must be reserved for cases at the high end of gravity. In the context of contempt, any stay must balance two competing public interests: the need for fairness and protection against abusive procedure on the one hand, and, on the other, the public interest in having allegations of contempt of court adjudicated on their merits to protect the authority of the judiciary. The alleged conduct here—attempts to thwart asset-freezing and enforcement orders by moving property and destroying electronic data—was described as serious, such that the Court would have been reluctant to terminate the contempt proceeding even if an abuse of process had been found.

Outcome and monetary consequences

In the result, the Superior Court dismissed Christian Bordeleau’s motion for a stay of proceedings in relation to the contempt citation issued on 8 June 2023, and referred the file to the master of the rolls so that the parties could be convened at a provisional roll-call to fix dates for a two-day hearing on the contempt motion, in line with the parties’ joint declaration. The court made no order for costs, expressly stating that the judgment was rendered “sans frais de justice.” Accordingly, in this decision the successful parties are the plaintiffs who had sought to proceed with the contempt motion, and no damages, penalties, or legal costs were granted or quantified in their favour; the total amount ordered in favour of the successful parties cannot be determined from this judgment because there is in fact no monetary award or costs granted at all.