Fair Compensation or Unjustified Temptation to Compromise?: an Empirical Review of Requests for Honorarium Awards in Canadian Class Actions

• Author: Marie Ong
• Position: Recent graduate of the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia
• Pages: 3-32

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Fair Compensation or Unjustif‌ied Temptation to

Compromise?: An Empirical Review of Requests for

Honorarium Awards in Canadian Class Actions

Marie Ong

AbstrAct: Every class action requires at least one representative plaintif‌f

to bring the action, perform certain litigation duties, and represent the

interests of the class members. If an action results in a successful outcome

for the class, courts may award the representative plaintif‌f an honorarium

as recognition for their contributions. The practice of approving honor-

ariums raises signif‌icant policy issues, however. On one hand, judges have

justif‌ied honorariums payments as appropriate compensation for a repre-

sentative plaintif‌f’s service on behalf of others. On the other hand, judges

are wary of encouraging the hiring of professional plaintif‌fs and cautious

of creating a perceived or real conf‌lict of interest between representative

plaintif‌fs and the absent class members.

In this paper, a comprehensive analysis of the role of representa-

tive plaintif‌fs is undertaken to explain the divergent and unpredictable

approaches to honorarium requests taken by courts across Canada’s class

actions landscape. Based on an empirical review of 116 published deci-

sions from 2010 to March 2021, this paper argues that there should be a

less restrictive and more uniform approach to awarding honorariums in

accordance with principles of fairness and the critical purpose of enhan-

cing access to justice.