👨⚖️ [Professional Secrecy - Solicitor-Client Privilege & Litigation Privilege]
🏭Foster Wheeler v. City of Montreal
**In Quebec, the concept of "professional secrecy refers to the 'institution as a whole' including confidentiality, right to professional silence, and immunity from disclosing confidential information. This is broken down into:
1) The client's Charter right to not have confidential information disclosed to anyone;
2) The lawyer's correlative obligation to preserve the confidential information;
3) The lawyer's immunity from disclosing to third parties, even in judicial proceedings.
When the lawyer and client have a prolonged relationship in which the lawyer plays different roles (advocate, business advisor, etc.), the relationship gives rise to a simple, rebuttable presumption that all communications are confidential. The party seeking disclosure must show, in relation to very specific documents, that those documents are either not protected by professional secrecy, or fall under a category for which the law creates an exception.
[Litigation Privilege] Documents prepared for the purposes of ongoing or contemplated litigation are protected in a manner similar to the common law "litigation privilege" but more properly subsumed by "professional secrecy" (see Lizotte).
🚫EXCEPTION [Good Faith Defence Can Constitute Waiver of Privilege - Reliance on Legal Advice]
Récupération Portneuf c. Saint-Alban Like in R v. Campbell, when one side uses "legal advice" as part of a defence of good faith, they may be required to disclose the legal advice that they received. By passing the buck onto in-house lawyers, the defendants are essentially renouncing their right to privilege by turning the advice into a fact that must be proved. If it turns out that they acted against legal advice, they could be in bad faith, so the court needs to see the evidence.