Procedural Fairness in Arbitration: An Appealable Question of Law?

The recent decision of the British Columbia Court of Appeal in Green Light Solutions Corp. v Kern BSG Management Ltd., 2025 BCCA 408, raises an important question for parties to arbitration, and one worth considering in every jurisdiction.

In that case, the Court held that an arbitrator’s failure to give the parties an opportunity to make submissions on costs, after they knew the outcome of the arbitration but before an award on costs was made, raised questions of procedural fairness, which the Court held to be an appealable question of law.

This outcome has been questioned by some commentators, who take the view that while such a conclusion may be appropriate in a statutory appeal process, it does not sit as comfortably in the arbitration context, where judicial intervention should be more limited and confined to substantive, rather than procedural, errors of law.

The breadth of appeal rights in an arbitration proceeding on matters of procedural fairness is an issue to watch, and further developments are likely.