Alberta Court of Appeal orders energy company to disclose records caught by arbitral request

The Alberta Court of Appeal allowed Inter Pipeline Ltd.’s (IPL) appeal of a chambers judge’s refusal to compel Teine Energy Ltd. to disclose documents falling within a request that the Arbitral Tribunal had made in a commercial arbitration. 

Teine, a shipper on IPL’s mid-Saskatchewan pipeline system (MSPS), initiated a commercial arbitration against IPL. Teine alleged that IPL failed to follow the proper methodology for compensating it for product quality changes between the MSPS entry and exit points. 

The Arbitral Tribunal made an award in Teine’s favour. 

Before the Alberta Court of King’s Bench, IPL filed the underlying application for leave to appeal the unfavourable arbitral award. IPL also applied for an order requiring Teine to produce specific documents allegedly necessary for the leave application. 

On Sept. 22, Justice Feasby of the Court of King’s Bench dismissed the application for a production order. 

The chambers judge accepted that Teine failed to produce and improperly withheld records in its possession in breach of Redfern Request No. 4, which the Arbitral Tribunal had issued during the arbitration. However, the judge saw no reasonable basis to find that the records would have impacted the Arbitral Tribunal’s conclusion on IPL’s limitation defence. 

The applicant brought a fast-track appeal against Justice Feasby’s decision. 

On Oct. 14, IPL applied to adjourn the underlying Court of King’s Bench proceedings. Justice Ho of the Court of King’s Bench denied the requested adjournment. 

Under r. 14.48(b) of the Alberta Rules of Court, Alta Reg 124/2010, IPL applied to stay the underlying Court of King’s Bench proceedings until the resolution of its appeal. 

Stay application denied

On Nov. 7, in Inter Pipeline Ltd v Teine Energy Ltd, 2025 ABCA 368, the Court of Appeal of Alberta denied the application. 

First, the appeal court characterized the stay application as a collateral attack on Justice Ho’s denial of the adjournment and decision that the Alberta Court of King’s Bench proceedings should move forward as scheduled. 

The appeal court noted that the applicant did not appeal Justice Ho’s decision or cite clear authority that r. 14.48 provided jurisdiction to stay proceedings regardless of their connections to the appealed order. 

Second, the appeal court found a stay inappropriate even if Justice Ho’s adjournment decision properly came before it. The appeal court stressed that it should: 

• Let the Court of King’s Bench control its own process 
• Respect the right of trial judges to manage their business 
• Confine its intervention to reviewing past errors, except in highly unusual circumstances 
• Refrain from trying to prevent potential future errors 
• Rarely hear and even more rarely interfere with scheduling decisions 

The appeal court noted that Justice Ho had the benefit of hearing the parties’ arguments, as well as the discretion to manage the orderly flow of litigation. 

Appeal granted

On Nov. 17, in Inter Pipeline Ltd v Teine Energy Ltd, 2025 ABCA 375, the appeal court allowed IPL’s fast-track appeal of the chambers judge’s refusal to compel Teine to disclose the records caught by Redfern Request No. 4. The appeal court ordered Teine to disclose the documents covered. 

The appeal court noted that the chambers judge did not need to establish a new test for the application to compel the production of documents that an arbitral tribunal directed a party to produce in a prior arbitration. 

The appeal court noted that the relevant rules did not prevent the production of records in these circumstances and that ss. 25(6) and (7) of Alberta’s Arbitration Act, 2000, allowed a court to enforce an arbitral tribunal’s order to produce records as if it were a court-issued direction in an action. 

In this case, the appeal court ruled that disclosure should have followed after the chambers judge determined that the undisclosed documents existed and fell within Redfern Request No. 4 because the request already dictated the records’ relevance and materiality. 

The appeal court noted that it was not ruling on the admissibility of the undisclosed documents. The appeal court held that the judge assigned to hear the underlying leave application should decide whether to set aside the undisclosed records for being inadmissible, which would engage the settled test for admitting new or fresh evidence. 

According to the appeal court, in that context, the judge would consider: 

• the records’ potential effects on the outcome 
• the limited right of statutory appeal of arbitration awards 
• the public policy relating to the arbitral process, which aims to prevent court interference in the parties’ choice of private dispute resolution