Jeffery Lyons paved the way for consumer lawsuits - The Globe and Mail

Long before he became widely known as Ontario’s most influential lobbyist and then a key player in a notorious procurement scandal that rocked Toronto City Hall in the early 2000s, Jeffery Lyons was a lawyer forging his reputation as a consumer... It was the early 1970s, and the Hamilton-born lawyer and Tory fundraiser had taken on a case representing more than 4,600 owners of a dodgy General Motors compact car known as the Firenza. car industry in the 1960s had to defend itself against massive liability lawsuits, which led to drastic changes in warranties and new consumer protection laws. Lyons’s long-time friend Paul Godfrey, former Metro Toronto chairman who is now president and CEO of Postmedia, joked that with that case, he was becoming Canada’s Ralph Nader. The problem for Mr. Lyons was that outside Quebec, provincial laws didn’t permit class-action lawsuits. Undaunted, he pressed ahead – the GM lawsuit was Canada’s first consumer class action – and won a few key lower court victories before the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously grounded his gambit in 1983. By then, Mr. Lyons had taken on, as... Source: www.theglobeandmail.com