Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Amendments to the Business Practices and Consumer Protection Act voiding arbitration clauses in consumer contracts were found to be retrospective, not retroactive, and therefore inapplicable to disputes arising before March 31, 2025.

• Vandenbosch alleged Rogers and Match were liable for a hacker stealing bitcoins valued at $534,529.87 from her cryptocurrency accounts through a social engineering scheme at a Match-operated kiosk.

• The appellant strategically abandoned multiple arguments and concessions before the chambers judge, then attempted to revive them on appeal, which the Court of Appeal declined to permit.

• Rogers' wireless services agreement contained a binding arbitration clause, and the agreement was provided to the appellant at least seven times between 2016 and 2021.

• Claims under the BC Privacy Act and Ontario Consumer Protection Act were found arbitrable, though the judge's analysis on these points was characterized as obiter dicta.

• Extension of the stay of proceedings to non-signatory Match was upheld on the basis of judicial economy and avoidance of inconsistent findings arising from the same factual matrix.

The facts of the case

Raelene Vandenbosch had been a Rogers Communications Canada Inc. customer since 2015, using the company as the service provider for her personal cell phone under a wireless services agreement that incorporated Rogers' terms of service. That agreement contained an arbitration clause requiring that, to the extent permitted by applicable law, any claim or dispute arising out of or relating to the agreement be resolved through final and binding arbitration to the exclusion of the courts. The agreement was provided to Vandenbosch at least seven times between 2016 and 2021.

On June 30, 2021, a hacker allegedly gained access to Vandenbosch's Rogers account, personal information, and cryptocurrency account. The hacker allegedly gained access to that information through a scheme in which they called a mobile phone kiosk in Québec operated by Match Transact Inc. (doing business as WOW! Mobile Boutique), an authorized dealer of Rogers products. Posing as a Rogers technician, the hacker convinced a clerk at the kiosk to provide access to the compromising information. Vandenbosch alleged the stolen bitcoins were valued at $534,529.87 at the time of the theft, and more than $1 million shortly thereafter. Notably, Vandenbosch had never herself done any business with Match or its subsidiaries—her information was on its systems through Match's dealings with Rogers.

The proceedings below and the shifting legal strategy

By way of a notice of civil claim dated June 19, 2023, Vandenbosch initiated proceedings against Rogers, Match, a John Doe Mobile Clerk, and a John Doe Hacker, alleging breaches of multiple federal, British Columbia, Ontario, and Québec statutes, as well as common law causes of action including breach of contract, negligence, and negligent misrepresentation. On December 8, 2023, Rogers filed a notice of application seeking a stay in favour of arbitration, and on May 14, 2024, Match also filed a notice of application seeking a stay of proceedings in favour of arbitration. On May 23, 2024, Vandenbosch filed a response in which she conceded, among other things, that the prerequisites for a stay in favour of arbitration—including the existence of an arbitration agreement—had been met, and that the common law causes of action and some of the statutory causes of action were indeed arbitrable.

The hearing commenced on November 7, 2024, at which point Vandenbosch indicated she was abandoning the causes of action based on Québec laws, instead pursuing those before the Superior Court of Québec. Before the hearing could be completed, the British Columbia Legislature enacted amendments to the Business Practices and Consumer Protection Act, which received royal assent on March 31, 2025. These amendments introduced provisions prohibiting dispute resolution terms in consumer contracts and declaring such terms void. A transitional provision, s. 203.001, stated that the new rules applied to "contracts entered into before, on or after the coming into force" of those provisions.

When the hearing continued on April 11, 2025, Vandenbosch's counsel advised the judge that she was withdrawing her concessions and her position on the abandoned causes of action. She was abandoning all her arguments and positions from November 7, 2024, and now opposing the Rogers stay application on a single basis: that, as a result of the amendments, the arbitration clause was void. On April 14, 2025, she filed an amended application response adding arguments that the amendments rendered Rogers' arbitration agreement illegal and void, while making substantial deletions in the legal basis section, including removing sections regarding the arbitrability of claims under BC law, the Ontario Consumer Protection Act, and the sequencing of non-arbitrable claims.

The arbitration clause at issue

The arbitration clause in Rogers' terms of service required that, to the extent permitted by applicable law, any claim or dispute—whether in contract or tort, under statute or regulation, or otherwise, and whether pre-existing, present, or future—arising out of or relating to the agreement, the services or equipment, oral or written statements, advertisements or promotions relating to the agreement, or the relationships resulting from the agreement, would be determined by final and binding arbitration to the exclusion of the courts. The clause specified that arbitration would be conducted in the province in which the customer resided, on a simplified and expedited basis by one arbitrator, with Rogers paying all reasonable costs associated with the arbitration.

The BPCPA amendments and the retroactive versus retrospective distinction

The central legal issue was whether the 2025 amendments to the BPCPA applied retroactively to Vandenbosch's dispute, which arose in 2021, or only retrospectively to future disputes under existing contracts. The chambers judge, Justice Chan, held that the amendments were intended to have a retrospective, but not retroactive, effect. This meant they applied to contracts entered into before March 31, 2025, but only for new disputes arising after that date. Since Vandenbosch's dispute arose in 2021—well before the amendments came into force—they did not affect her arbitration clause.

The Court of Appeal agreed with this analysis, finding that while s. 203.001 was clear to the extent that it had backwards-looking application, the section did not specifically provide, as it could have, that the amendments applied to claims that had arisen before March 31, 2025. Accordingly, it did not meet the high burden of applying retroactively. The Court drew support from the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Dell Computer Corp. v. Union des consommateurs, where the Court had noted that retroactive operation of a statute is highly exceptional, and where a law is ambiguous and can have two interpretations, the one that does not give it retroactive effect is to be preferred. The Court of Appeal also found assistance in Lin v. Weng, decided by the Ontario Court of Appeal, which had concluded that if the Legislature had intended a provision to be retroactive, "it would have used clear language to so state."

Hansard records further supported this interpretation. During the committee stage, the Attorney General, the Honourable Niki Sharma, who sponsored the amendments, responded to a question about whether the transitional provision proposed retroactivity by stating: "It's not retroactive; it's retrospective. What that means is it doesn't reach back in time and say that the law was always this way. It says that the law is as of now this way, and any contracts that existed before…" The Court of Appeal observed that after this clarification was provided to the Members of the Legislative Assembly, the amendments were not modified as they went through the process to become law.

The Court also contrasted the transitional provision in the amendments with that considered in Barbour v. The University of British Columbia, where the Legislature had clearly and expressly stated an intention for retroactive application using language such as "despite any decision of a court to the contrary," "conclusively deemed valid for all purposes," and "retroactive to the extent necessary to give full force and effect to its provisions." No comparable language appeared in the BPCPA amendments.

New arguments and abandoned issues on appeal

The Court of Appeal refused to entertain Vandenbosch's attempts to raise new or previously abandoned arguments on appeal. Her second ground of appeal—that the arbitration protocol was never properly brought to her attention in alleged violation of the Wireless Code—was acknowledged by the appellant herself as a new issue not before the chambers judge. The Court found it was not one of those exceptional circumstances where the interests of justice warranted considering a new issue for the first time on appeal, particularly given that the appellant had previously conceded the existence of the arbitration agreement and then resiled from that concession only to focus solely on the amendments argument.

Her third ground of appeal—that claims under the BC Privacy Act and Ontario Consumer Protection Act were not legally arbitrable—had been specifically abandoned by the appellant in her amended application response. Though the chambers judge had addressed those issues "for the sake of completeness," the Court of Appeal characterized those comments as obiter dicta, no more no less, and held that the extent to which they may influence judicial analysis in the future was speculative at best. The Court declined to provide guidance on the proper interpretation of s. 4 of the Privacy Act based on obiter comments and without fulsome submissions.

The extension of the stay to Match

Regarding the extension of the stay to Match, the Court upheld the chambers judge's discretionary decision. The judge had found that the claims against Match arose from the same factual matrix as the claims against Rogers, and that if the claims against Match were not stayed, there would be multiple proceedings and the possibility of inconsistent findings, and Match might need to pursue a third-party claim against Rogers. The Court of Appeal noted that the stay against Rogers was ordered pursuant to s. 7 of the Arbitration Act—a mandatory stay provision—while the stay against Match was granted on a discretionary basis grounded in judicial economy and avoidance of multiplicity of proceedings. The Court found no reviewable error in the judge's exercise of discretion.

The ruling and outcome

The British Columbia Court of Appeal, in a unanimous decision written by Justice Abrioux and concurred in by Justices Winteringham and Mayer, dismissed the appeal on all five grounds on March 10, 2026. The respondents Rogers and Match were the successful parties, with the stays of proceedings in favour of arbitration remaining in place. The Court affirmed that the BPCPA amendments operated retrospectively and not retroactively, declined to permit the raising of new or previously abandoned arguments, sustained the discretionary extension of the stay to Match, and refused to lift the stays. The appellant's request to have the stays lifted due to alleged delays by Rogers and Match was directed to the British Columbia Supreme Court rather than the Court of Appeal. No specific monetary award was ordered in this appellate decision, as the underlying dispute regarding the alleged cryptocurrency theft remains to be determined through arbitration.