Recently Mr. Justice Argento of the Alberta Court of Justice considered Non-Competition agreements in the context of Independent Contractors. We know from earlier decisions that these types of restraint of trade based restrictive covenants are unenforceable on their face, and the burden falls to the party seeking to enforce it to show that the restraint is reasonable and unambiguous. This was the case in NL Fisher Supervision & Engineering Ltd. v Boettger, 2024 ABCJ 225
His Honour found that the restrictive covenants found in the Contractor Agreements were not reasonable in that they were ambiguous and disallowed the Plaintiff's claim to enforce them. This is yet another decision formalizing that outside of very specific cases, restraint of trade type provisions in a contract will not be enforceable.
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