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The Ecuador judgment, eventually reduced to US$9.5 billion, was discovered to be so putridly corrupt that every nation on earth that Donziger took it to has since refused to enforce it — except our beloved Canada. Despite the stench of it, the Supreme Court of Canada in 2015 ruled that enforcement proceedings could commence against Chevron Canada, a subsidiary of Chevron Corp., even though under Canadian corporate law Chevron Canada is a completely separate legal entity from Chevron Corp. Our judges essentially said that global “comity” (read: our exceptional national politeness) required the judgment to be enforced here.

The court may quietly be rethinking those juridical gymnastics given what has transpired between then and now.

In a textbook case of what is wrong with the idea that Canada should willy-nilly recognize foreign jurisdictions without proper scrutiny, the Ecuador judgment was rejected for enforcement by the United States, Brazil and Argentina. Then, in late 2018, an international investment tribunal in The Hague unanimously found that it would even be a violation of international law for any country to recognize and enforce the fraudulent Ecuadorian judgment. Donziger was disbarred last year by the state of New York for his role in the Ecuadorian fraud. Around the same time last year, the Ontario Court of Appeal delivered a blow to Donziger’s attempts to collect in Canada. It found the case, which is being fought in Canada by Toronto lawyer Alan Lenczner, amounted to “an exhortation that we should do the right thing for his clients, untethered to the jurisprudence, the statutory rights of corporations, or any discernible principle.”