John Tyhurst is a Visiting Professor in the Common Law Section (English), who is teaching competition law in the fall and spring terms. He practiced civil litigation, including competition law, at the Department of Justice in Ottawa prior to his retirement in June, 2019. Since then he has being pursuing writing and research in the area of competition law.
Born in Montreal and raised in Vancouver, he completed his economics degree at UBC, LL.B. and LL.M. at Toronto and McGill respectively and then articled in Vancouver with a large private sector firm. He then moved to Ottawa to practice with a consumer organization which intervened before various regulatory tribunals, including the CRTC and CITT. He participated in the process that led to the watershed amendments to the competition legislation which occurred in 1986. He then joined the Department of Justice in the Legal Services Unit providing advice and litigation support to the Competition Bureau and practiced there for 10 years. During that period, he prosecuted criminal price fixing and bid-rigging cases, and appeared before the Competition Tribunal in numerous civil merger, abuse of dominance and vertical restraints cases as well as the Federal Court of Appeal and Supreme Court. He moved to the Civil Litigation Section in 1997 to work on the first NAFTA Chapter 11 investor-state proceeding, and thereafter practiced a broad range of civil litigation, including trade, telecommunications, judicial review, indigenous law and appellate litigation. He was part of the Justice’s Supreme Court Practice Group, and appeared before the Supreme Court in several competition law, tort, aboriginal and indigenous law cases. He appeared before other appellate courts, including the Federal and Ontario courts of appeal and conducted civil trials, arbitrations and interventions as counsel for the Attorney General of Canada.
He has authored various conference and other papers in the areas of competition, indigenous and tort law, including: “Competition Law and the Constitution: 1889-1989”, with D.J. Rutherford, Q.C., in Khemani and Stanbury, eds., Historical Perspectives on Competition Policy, 1991; “Monopoly Lost? The Legal and Regulatory Path to Canadian Telecommunications Competition, 1979-2002”, 33 Ottawa Law Review 385; “Intention, Recklessness and Misfeasance in Public Office” (2010), 23 Canadian Journal of Administrative Law and Practice 247; and “Proving History: The Role of the Expert”, The Advocate, November, 2017.