ARE HOCKEY GLOVES REALLY GLOVES?

Firm sought reclassification for duty refund

For all the matters of grave constitutional import that come before it, sometimes the Supreme Court of Canada catches a silly one.

So it was, back in March, when the full bench of nine justices convened to consider whether hockey gloves are actually “gloves” in the eyes of the law. Perhaps, as an importer insisted, they are “other articles of plastic.”

As the top court’s 47-page decision on Thursday reveals, the judges could not agree on this deeply Canadian riddle. Justice Suzanne Côté dissented. But the others were of a single mind. Hockey gloves are gloves. End of story, as far as the law is concerned. You got a problem with that, take it up with Parliament.

The case began more than a decade ago, when Igloo Vikski Inc., a company in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Que., imported some hockey gloves, which border agents classified as “gloves, mittens and mitts,” including catchers and blockers for goalies. So far, so logical.

The trouble started with Igloo Vikski’s request for a partial refund of duty, on the grounds the gloves were miscategorized. The Canadian International Trade Tribunal refused. It reasoned that the gloves were not “other articles of plastic” because they were not made by sewing or sealing sheets of plastic together, as one section of customs law requires, and their plastic padding was “more than mere trimming.” Hockey gloves were still, officially, gloves.

But then along came the Federal Court of Appeal. It allowed the importer’s appeal, because in the hierarchical scheme of customs law, hockey gloves were goods made of “mixed substances,” so a further determination was required before they could be properly classified.

Now, the Supreme Court of Canada has decided the Federal Court of Appeal got it wrong. Or, more precisely, it was wrong to think the trade tribunal was wrong.

“Read as a whole, the CITT’s decision was reasonable,” the majority found. Regardless whether it is ultimately true or false in the eyes of the great referee in the sky, it was at least “reasonable” in the eyes of the law to decide that hockey gloves are gloves.

Henceforth, Canadian jurisprudence will reflect this. This case is a binding precedent on all future disputes about the ontology of hockey gloves.

Justice Côté, however, disagreed. She thought the tribunal’s decision, that hockey gloves are gloves, “falls well outside the range of reasonable interpretations.”

Written for the majority by Justice Russell Brown, the judgment begins with a riff on a famous British ruling on negligence, in a case about damage caused by stray cricket balls, in which the dissent opens with the line: “In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone.”

“In wintertime ice hockey is the delight of everyone,” Brown writes.

“The goaltender’s attention must remain fixed on the play, and not on off-ice matters,” Brown wrote. “Certainly, the goaltender should strain to avoid being distracted by the question before the court in this appeal — being whether, for customs tariff classification purposes, he or she blocks and catches the puck with a ‘glove, mitten or mitt,’ or with an ‘article of plastics.’ ”