Piercing the Corporate Veil in the Canadian Common Law Courts: An Empirical Study 41 Queen's Law Journal 2015-2016

41 Queen's L.J. 207 (2015-2016)
Piercing the Corporate Veil in the Canadian Common Law Courts: An Empirical Study

handle is hein.journals/queen41 and id is 225 raw text is:

Piercing the Corporate Veil in the

Canadian Common Law Courts:

An Empirical Study

Mohamed F. Khimji* & Christopher C. Nicholls

The legal principles developed and applied in common law courts in claims to pierce the
corporate veil consist of a mishmash of indeterminate expressions that have been in a state of
confusion since their inception. This article presents the results of the first empirical study of
Canadian common law veil piercing cases. The study is modeled on similar studies undertaken
in other major common law jurisdictions including the US, the UK andAustralia. The findings
are not necessarily consistent with prior descriptive and normative claims about veil piercing.
Jile veil piercing claims are most successful in the context of sole shareholder corporations,
claims by third party government entities andfamily law, courts were not found to pierce the
corporate veil more often in tort cases than in contract cases and the relationship between the
jurisdiction of the court and the outcome of veil piercing cases was found to be statistically
significant. Factors that did not have a statistically significant relationship with veil piercing
rates include the decade in which the case was decided and the level of court.

I Associate Professor and Stephen Dattels Chair in Corporate Finance Law, Faculty of
Law, Western University.
- Professor and W Geoff Beattie Chair in Corporate Law, Faculty of Law, Western
University. The authors would like to thank Jennifer Organ who provided assistance with
data management and Tatiana Vashchilko who provided assistance with data analysis.
Additionally, the funding for this article provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council Standard Research Grant Program is gratefully acknowledged.

M. Khimji and C. Nicholls

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