A number of questions decided in The Buenos Aires Maru will cause reverberations for years to come. First, the Supreme Court defined Canadian maritime law “as encompassing the common law principles of tort, contract and bailment” and added that Canadian maritime law “is uniform throughout Canada” and “is not the law of any province of Canada”. Thus, the civil law origins of maritime law are ignored as is the dual nature of Canadian law (the province of Quebec, from where the appeal arose, is a civil law jurisdiction). The decision probably means, for example, that the marine insurance Acts of five provinces and the marine insurance provisions of the Quebec Civil Code are ultra vires. The decision also declared a Himalaya clause valid and a non-responsibility clause after discharge clause valid—even if the non-responsibility clause did not mention the word “negligence”! Thus, Canada Steamship Lines Ltd. v. The King 2 was distinguished.

Finally, the court noted that whether the terminal operator is responsible for theft of cargo after discharge or whether the cargo owner should be responsible is of little importance because insurance will bear the loss! Such reasoning invites irresponsible conduct on the part of carriers, terminal agents, stevedores and even shippers, let alone apoplexy on the part of the insurance industry.

In a single paragraph judgment, the Supreme Court upheld the principle that a maritime lien is substantive and therefore that a foreign maritime lien for necessaries supplied to a ship in the United States should be recognized by a Canadian court. Thus, the court’s previous position in The Ioannis Daskalelis 4 was properly upheld and the position taken by the Privy Council in Bankers Trust International Ltd. v. Todd Shipyards Corp. (The Halcyon Isle)5 correctly refuted.