Under the Settlement Agreement, the Implementation Date for the settlement is 30 days after the last Court Approval Order becomes final. The Court Approval Orders become final when the time period for an appeal expires, or if an appeal is filed, when that appeal is finally dealt with. To my knowledge, no appeal has been filed, and the deadline for filing appeals expired yesterday. So the Implementation Date for the settlement is 30 days from yesterday. The government will not provide any of the money for the settlement until the Implementation Date.
The further 30 day period is necessary because of section 36 of the British Columbia Class Proceedings Act, which says:
(2) If a representative plaintiff does not appeal as permitted by subsection (1) within the time limit for bringing an appeal set under section 14 (1) (a) of the Court of Appeal Act or if a representative plaintiff abandons an appeal under subsection (1), any member of the class or subclass for which the representative plaintiff had been appointed may apply to a justice of the Court of Appeal for leave to act as the representative plaintiff for the purposes of subsection (1).
(3) An application by a class or subclass member for leave to act as the representative plaintiff under subsection (2) must be made within 30 days after the expiry of the appeal period available to the representative plaintiff or by such other date as the justice may order.
We plan to mail applications to everyone we have an address for. The application forms will also be posted on a special settlement website to be set up and run by Crawford. If you don't get an application in the mail, and can't get one from the website, there will be a phone number where you can call and have one mailed to you.
The website address, phone numbers and mailing addresses will be posted here as soon as they are available.
