Regulators who do not have a specific standard must rely
on common law requirements, but must be aware that the existence and content of a common law duty to cooperate may be open to dispute, e.g., in terms of whether a professional must cooperate by answering specific questions during an investigation, or may «respond» simply by denying allegations.
It bears noting that members of organized real estate must comply with all legislative, regulatory and
common law requirements applicable to real estate professionals in jurisdictions across Canada, quite apart from any of CREA's rules.
The Samson case has given rise to two interpretations, a narrow one which benefits ordinary unsecured creditors for whom a deemed trust is created (since they are not the Crown), and a broader one which maintains that any deemed trust created by provincial legislation, in favour of the Crown or not, must meet
the common law requirements of trust law in order to obtain priority over secured creditors pursuant to the BIA.
So long as those contracts meet
the common law requirements for contract and comply with provincial / territorial family law statutes they can be upheld.
The language of the decision may suggest that those agreements strip an interim bill of
the common law requirement for finality thus taking them entirely outside the scope of the Solicitors Act.