Is there any case law supporting the argument that misrepresentation can occur even in the absence of overt representation?

Ontario, Canada


The following excerpt is from Lysko v. Braley, 2004 CanLII 40666 (ON SC):

The plaintiff argues that a misrepresentation can occur even in the absence of an overt representation and relies on Queen v. Cognos in making that argument. In my view, Queen v. Cognos does not assist the plaintiff.

In Queen v. Cognos, there was an explicit representation, which, in the context in which it was made, amounted to a misrepresentation. It was a representation from which the natural and obvious inference was untrue. There, the plaintiff was offered a job by the defendant whose representative told him that he was to take charge of a specific project. The natural inference of that statement was that the project existed or was going to exist. The representative believed the project would proceed but knew that it had not yet been approved by senior management. He did not disclose this to the plaintiff who gave up his former employment and moved with his family to accept the defendant’s job offer. A term of the employment contract was that he could be dismissed on a month’s notice. The project which the plaintiff was hired to manage was not approved by senior management, did not come into existence, and the plaintiff’s employment was terminated.

In my view, there is a significant difference between making no representation, which is the complaint in this pleading, and making a representation or set of representations that reasonably leads or is calculated to mislead the recipient of the information to an inference which is not true. The latter is what occurred in Queen v. Cognos.

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