Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Three self-represented applicants sought judicial review of the City of Saint John's July 7, 2025 decision to rezone property for the proposed Spruce Lake Industrial Park.
• Bias — actual or reasonably apprehended — by City Council members was the central ground for challenging the rezoning decision.
• Determining the proper scope of the Record on Application was the primary procedural issue before the court on this motion.
• Municipal councils, as policy-making bodies, are held to a more lenient bias standard than adjudicative tribunals, requiring proof of a fully closed mind rather than a mere appearance of bias.
• Each of the three remaining disclosure requests was denied on grounds of irrelevance, solicitor-client privilege, or the prohibited nature of a fishing expedition.
• No costs were ordered by the court at this stage of the proceedings.

Facts of the case

Adam Wilkins, Christopher Watson, and Shayne Galbraith — all self-represented — filed a Notice of Application for judicial review under Rule 69 of the Rules of Court, seeking to quash a decision made by the City of Saint John (City Council) on July 7, 2025. That decision approved the rezoning of property comprising the proposed Spruce Lake Industrial Park. The applicants argued that the decision was made by a biased decision-maker and was unreasonable for its failure to conform to the Municipal Plan. The hearing of the application was scheduled for September 1–2, 2026. The motion before Justice Kathryn A. Gregory concerned the applicants' request for documentary disclosure to expand the Record on Application beyond what was before the decision-maker at the time of the July 7, 2025 decision.

In support of their bias allegations, the applicants pointed to several items obtained through Right to Information requests: a letter from Mayor Reardon, dated a year before the decision, stating that the lands in question "would serve as an excellent opportunity for the City to expand its industrial land holdings"; a comment made by a councillor at a public meeting, also a year before the decision, that "we've got to stop lying to the people of Lorneville"; and public remarks made by Councillor Brent Harris on May 12, 2025, which resulted in a code-of-conduct investigation. As of the hearing, the Record on Application already comprised more than 7,000 pages of materials.

Procedural and legal framework

The applicants brought this motion pursuant to an earlier Procedural Order, which directed that any request for additional disclosure be made by formal motion. This was the applicants' third request for additional materials. City Council, while not strenuously objecting to reasonable expansion of the record, sought clear parameters and finality on the disclosure issue to avoid delaying the September hearing dates. City Council also placed the applicants on notice that future piecemeal disclosure motions may attract cost orders.

The court identified relevance as the central guiding principle for disclosure in judicial review proceedings. Justice Gregory noted that a judicial review under Rule 69 is not an appeal but a review of the reasonableness of a decision made by a public administrative body — limited, as emphasized in Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick, 2008 SCC 9, to avoiding undue interference with the discharge of administrative functions.

Reasoning and analysis

Three disclosure requests remained live at the hearing (the applicants had abandoned others). With respect to the first — the Saint John Industrial Parks Market Assessment prepared by Deloitte in 2023 — the court found the document inadmissible and irrelevant because it was not before the decision-maker at the time of the July 7, 2025 decision. The court rejected the applicants' argument that any material seen or read by individual councillors in other contexts was, by that fact alone, relevant to the decision-making process or indicative of bias.

On the second request — all draft and final agendas, minutes, reports, and presentations from closed-door meetings of Common Council between May 18, 2022 and July 7, 2025 relating to the Spruce Lake Industrial Park — City Council identified only one relevant closed-door meeting, held on June 17, 2024, and asserted solicitor-client privilege over its minutes. The court accepted that claim of privilege. It further found that the inferential leap from a councillor's comment made two months after the closed-door meeting — in the face of the City's assertion that the meeting concerned legal advice — was not one it was prepared to make on the evidence before it. The applicants' broader request for all materials seen or heard by councillors in other contexts was found to rest on a problematic premise incompatible with the proper scope of judicial review.

Throughout its analysis, the court relied on the Supreme Court of Canada's guidance in Newfoundland Telephone Co. v. Newfoundland, [1992] 1 SCR 623, and the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal's decision in Halifax v. Dalhousie University, 2025 NSCA 33. Both authorities distinguish between the stricter reasonable-apprehension-of-bias standard applicable to adjudicative bodies and the more lenient standard applicable to municipal councils acting in a legislative or policy-making capacity. Under the latter standard, disqualifying bias requires proof that the decision-maker had prejudged the matter to such a degree that any contrary representations would be futile — a closed mind, not merely a predisposition.

Ruling and overall outcome

On the third and final request — the Final Report from the code-of-conduct complaint (2024-002) made against Councillor Brent Harris, dated November 18, 2024 — the court found the report neither needed to be disclosed nor produced. The court reasoned that a code-of-conduct investigation report is an opinion of external counsel and cannot serve as evidence on which the court could rely to make findings of fact about the councillor's public statements. The court further found that seeking the report for the possibility that it might reveal additional evidence of bias amounted to a prohibited fishing expedition.

All three remaining disclosure requests were denied. The City of Saint John was the successful party on this motion. The court made no order as to costs, consistent with City Council's position that it was not, at that time, seeking costs against the applicants. No monetary amount was awarded or ordered.