Today's trial.

• Author: Mitchell, Teresa

"O It is excellent to have a giant's strength but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant." --Shakespeare, Measure for Measure Joseph Authorson suffered from schizophrenia as a young man. Nevertheless, eight days after the Second World War was declared, he signed up to fight for Canada. The war left him a broken man, discharged from the army in 1943 suffering from combat-related mental illness. In 1950, he underwent a lobotomy, and he spent the years from then until his death in 2002 in a veterans' hospital. His niece, Lenore Majoros saw him at a family funeral in 1997 and was shocked at his appearance "He was very shabbily dressed. He looked as though he needed a haircut. He hadn't been shaved. His clothes were ill-fitting. He just looked like a little waif".

Lenore Majoros looked into her uncle's care at the London, Ontario veteran's hospital where he lived. She discovered that he had been receiving a small veterans' pension all those years and had an estate of about $230,000 but Veterans Affairs had been managing it on his behalf and no interest had been paid until 1990. Even worse, she realized that the government, worried about a warning from the Auditor General about a huge liability issue, had passed an amendment to the Department of Veterans Affairs Act that provided that no claim for interest could be made on monies held or administered by the Minister prior to January 1, 1990. Ms Majoros obtained a Power of Attorney over her uncle's affairs and began a class action lawsuit for him and other disabled veterans. She succeeded in obtaining a judgment stating that the federal government breached its fiduciary duty to the aging veterans by not paying interest on their military pensions and disability benefits or investing the funds on their behalf, and that the amendment to the law was inoperative under the Canadian Bill of Rights. The trial judge called the government's conduct "reprehensible." The Ontario Court of Appeal upheld the trial judgment and the government appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Justice Jack Major wrote the unanimous judgment of the Court. He concluded "The Department of Veterans Affairs Acts. 5.1 (4) takes a property claim from a vulnerable group, in disregard of the Crown's fiduciary duty to disabled veterans. However, that taking is within the power of Parliament. The appeal has to be allowed."

Both parties had agreed that if s.5.1 (4) of the Act was operative, then the Crown had no liability...