Can a third party claim be terminated as an abuse of process?
British Columbia, Canada
The following excerpt is from L.M. v. British Columbia (Director of Child, Family and Community Services), 2016 BCSC 275 (CanLII):
One circumstance in which abuse of process has been applied is where the litigation before the court is found to be in essence an attempt to relitigate a claim which the court has already determined. See Solomon v. Smith, supra. It is on that basis that Nordheimer J. found that this third party claim ought to be terminated as an abuse of process.
The doctrine of abuse of process engages the court's inherent power to prevent the misuse of its procedure that brings the administration of justice into disrepute. The focus is on the integrity of the judicial decision making as a branch of the administration of justice. It is an abuse of process to take court time to deal with the same matter for a second time: Brown v. Canada, 2015 BCSC 1910 at para.47.
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