John S. Tyhurst

John Tyhurst is currently a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, Common Law Section (English), where he teaches competition law. He practiced civil litigation, including competition law, at the Department of Justice in Ottawa for over thirty-two years. Born in Montreal and raised in Vancouver, he completed his BA in economics at the University of British Columbia, his LLB at the University of Toronto, and his LLM at McGill University as a recipient of a Duff-Rinfret Scholarship. He articled in Vancouver and then moved to Ottawa to practice with a consumer organization that intervened before various regulatory tribunals, including the CRTC and CITT. He participated in the process that led to watershed amendments to Canadian competition legislation in 1986. He then joined the Department of Justice, providing advice and litigation support to the Competition Bureau at the Departmental Legal Services Unit, where he practiced for ten years. During that period, he prosecuted criminal price fixing and bid-rigging cases, and appeared before the Competition Tribunal in civil merger, abuse of dominance, and vertical restraints cases as well as before the Federal Court of Appeal and Supreme Court of Canada. 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, and Indigenous law. He was a member of Department of Justice’s Supreme Court Practice Group, and appeared before the Supreme Court in competition law, tort, 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. In 2020 he was awarded the J Edward (Ted) Thompson, QC award for excellence in trial advocacy.