When two documents are "read together", what does that mean?

Saskatchewan, Canada


The following excerpt is from Merchant v. Law Society of Saskatchewan, 2002 SKCA 60 (CanLII):

To put the matter another way: when two documents are “read together”, all conclusions respecting anything contained in one document are reserved until the other document has been read. Only then does the reader draw conclusions about what was said in the first document. What is said in the first document takes its colour, as it were, from, or is modified by, what is said in the second document. If the two documents raise an ambiguity or an apparent conflict (as opposed to an unequivocal, out-and-out contradiction) then “to read the two documents together” means reading them in a way that does not produce contradictions or a nullification of one by the other. It means reading them is a way that removes the ambiguity and the conflict. It is not unlike reading two statutory provisions together in an effort to remove an ambiguity or apparent conflict (see for example MacKeigan v. Hickman, 1989 CanLII 40 (SCC), [1989] 2 S.C.R. 796 where McLachlin J. said at p. 825, “I start from the fundamental principle of construction that provisions of a statute dealing with the same subject should be read together, where possible, so as to avoid conflict”). As is noted below, Mr. H.J., in this case, read the two documents in question together as he should have, and he resolved what he called “the difference” between them. In other words he resolved the ambiguity. He was not misled.

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