In the civil law court system, you cannot wait forever to launch a lawsuit. Each province in Canada has specific legislation about how much time you have to sue once you know, or ought to have known, that you have a case against someone else. The legislation is often entitled “A Statute of Limitations.” The Supreme Court of Canada has set out three reasons for limitation periods:
“There are three rationales and they may be described as the certainty, evidentiary, and diligence rationales …Statutes of Limitations have been long said to be statutes of repose …. The reasoning is straightforward enough. There comes a time, it is said, when a potential defendant should be secure in his reasonable expectations that he will not be held to account for ancient obligations. The second rationale is evidentiary and concerns the desire to foreclose claims based on stale evidence. Once the limitation period has lapsed, the potential defendant should no longer be concerned about the presentation of evidence relevant to the claim …Finally, plaintiffs are expected to act diligently and not “sleep on their rights”; statutes of limitations are an incentive for plaintiffs to bring suit in a timely fashion.”
A defendant may use the expiry of a limitation period as a defence in a lawsuit. There is also another defence that a defendant may put forward. It is called the doctrine of laches. To have the benefit of this defence, a defendant must prove delay on the part of the plaintiff in launching the lawsuit and either acquiescence by the plaintiff showing acceptance of the defendant’s conduct or a situation which has caused the defendant to alter his or her positon in reasonable reliance on the plaintiff’s acquiescence of the status quo.