Canada (Attorney General) v. Matco Tools Corporation, 2025 FCA 156
Justice Goyette; Justice Locke; Justice LeBlanc - 2025-09-05
Read full decision. Automatically generated summary:
The AGC appeals 2025 FC 118 that granted an application for judicial review of a decision of the Commissioner of Patents. The Commissioner’s Decision refused a request by the respondent, Matco, to reinstate its patent application pursuant to subsection 73(3) of the Patent Act following the non-payment of a periodic maintenance fee and associated late fee. ... I have concluded that the FC Decision should indeed be set aside, and the Commissioner’s Decision restored. ... The failure to forward the Notice to Matco seems to have arisen from Hahn’s interpretation of Matco’s instructions that Hahn was to take no further action with respect to the payment of maintenance fees. It would be problematic, in my view, if an applicant were able to reduce or evade the strict requirements of due care by simply citing the limited scope of its instructions to its agents and other representatives. Patent applicants should not be encouraged to limit the scope of their instructions for this purpose. ... In the end, either Hahn failed to exercise due care by not forwarding the Notice to Matco, or Ridout failed to exercise due care by forwarding the Notice to someone who could not be expected to forward it to Matco. ... The Commissioner was properly concerned with measures that were taken, or could have been taken, to avoid the deemed abandonment after the deadline for paying the maintenance fee had passed. Here, the Commissioner was principally concerned with the failure to forward the Notice to Matco. In my view, the Federal Court’s focus on the data migration error represented an inappropriate failure to defer to the Commissioner’s reasoning.
Decision relates to:
- A-42-25 - ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CANADA V. MATCO TOOLS CORPORATION which is an appeal from 2025 FC 118 in T-31-24