Published December 16, 2023

Joel Goldenberg – The Suburban LJI Reporter

The City of Côte St. Luc is seeking the dismissal of the near 20-year-old case against them by the owner of the Meadowbrook Golf Course, Meadowbrook Groupe Pacific.

Meadowbrook Groupe Pacifique and the site’s previous owner have wanted to develop the golf course, which is located in Côte St. Luc and the City of Montreal borough of Lachine, for housing for decades. Legal actions have been taken by Meadowbrook contesting Montreal’s refusal to enable the course to be developed.

Legal action was also taken in 2002, against CSL’s rezoning in 2000 of its part of the land from residential to recreational.

Councillor Dida Berku introduced a resolution at council calling on the firm of Belanger Sauvé to file a motion to dismiss the case, and to pay an invoice amount to $19,994.73 to the firm.

“We were originally sued for approximately $30 million and the lawsuit is still going on 20 years later,” she explained. “Our new attorney on the file has discovered some technical irregularity, which he considers to be significant. So, we agreed to go forward with the motion to dismiss. We’ll see how that works out. In the meantime, our case is suspended until the City of Montreal defends the” Development Plan for the entire agglomeration, 2015 (Schema) concerning the designation of its property” on the Lachine side.

Asked at the end of the meeting to specify the technicalities prompting the motion to dismiss, Berku told The Suburban “our attorney uncovered that they declare one owner to be the owner of the Lachine side, and another owner to be the owner of the Côte St. Luc side.

“Actually, there’s an issue with legally who is the real owner. One owner on the CSL side is the party that acquired the litigious rights when they bought the property from Marathon Realty. The two owners are related companies. It’s very technical.”

In 2022, as reported by The Suburban, Quebec Superior Court Judge Babak Barin rejected two June 2021 bids by Montreal and Côte St. Luc to dismiss then-new legal action against them by Meadowbrook Groupe Pacific.

Montreal and CSL were requesting “the dismissal of Meadowbrook’s two originating applications.” In 2021, Groupe Pacifique’s original cases against Montreal and CSL were amended to claim that “it is the victim of a disguised and illegal expropriation of its land by Montreal as well as by CSL, due to regulatory changes of urban planning applicable thereto, and that, alternatively, the Scheme and the concordance by-laws instituted by Montreal are ultra vires or unenforceable against it.”

Montreal claimed that “Meadowbrook’s action is abusive, manifestly ill-founded in law and does not raise any question of law that has not already been dealt with by the Superior Court and the Court of Appeal.

CSL claimed that “based on the Municipalité de Saint-Colomban vs. Boutique de golf Gilles Gareau inc. case, ‘Meadowbrook’s action is doomed to failure given the state of the law, the application of which ‘cannot be the subject of any reservation or hesitation, the almost century-old [use] of the golf course for recreational purposes that are not altered or modified by the regulations of [CSL].”

But the judge dismissed the claims of the two cities in 2022, with legal costs, writing, an order to conclude the cases against Montreal and CSL are abusive, “they must be manifestly ill-founded, frivolous, dilatory and the abuse must be summarily established.”

The judge wrote that Meadowbrook’s experts “seem to indicate, rightly or wrongly, that the activities and uses permitted by the By-laws do not allow Meadowbrook the reasonable enjoyment of its property.

“In the circumstances and at this stage, therefore, terminating Meadowbrook’s claims prematurely would potentially nullify its rights. Without commenting on the chances of success of these, Meadowbrook must benefit from the opportunity to demonstrate how the effect of the regulations constitutes a disguised expropriation by the reduction of permitted uses, which it is trying to do with his expertise. It is therefore premature at this stage to deprive Meadowbrook of its recourse against Montreal, as well as against CSL.” n

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