Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Scope of the “record” on judicial review, limited to material actually before the university Senate Executive Committee when it decided the student’s appeal
• Adequacy and completeness of the amended record, including missing content from PDFs and mis-handled electronic documents and hyperlinks
• Treatment of hyperlinked and third-party-hosted documents as part of the evidentiary record when they were before the decision-maker
• Whether hearing notes from a prior Senate committee (Dorcas Seun-Salami) and from the Senate Executive Committee secretary (Shannon Morrison) formed part of the record
• Distinction between admissible “record” materials and other notes or minutes that were created later or not before the committee, which would require a motion to adduce fresh evidence
• Practical choice between an electronic and paper record format to ensure accuracy, stability of content, and equal access for the parties and the Court

Background and academic context
The case arises from the academic career of Tanya Bilsbury, a PhD student in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Saint Mary’s University. She was granted a one-year leave of absence from her PhD program on December 20, 2022. During this leave, she sought to return earlier than originally scheduled. In July 2023, she applied for early reactivation into the program, but that request was denied. Later in 2023, around late November or early December, she again applied for reactivation into her PhD program in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. That second reactivation request was also denied on December 19, 2023, although she was offered the option of “transferring” into a PhD Applied Science program instead. Rejecting this outcome, she pursued the university’s internal appeal mechanisms.

Procedural history of the academic appeals
Following the December 19, 2023 decision refusing reactivation and offering a transfer, Ms. Bilsbury appealed to the Senate Committee on Academic Appeals on December 22, 2024. Her appeal was heard on March 6, 2025, and the Senate Committee on Academic Appeals dismissed her appeal on March 10, 2025. At that March 6 hearing, a committee member, Dorcas Seun-Salami, took notes for the Committee. After this loss, Ms. Bilsbury escalated her challenge to the Senate Executive Committee. She appealed the Academic Appeals Committee’s decision on April 10, 2025. The Senate Executive Committee heard her matter on May 8, 2025 and denied her appeal, issuing its written decision on May 9, 2025. During the May 8, 2025 Senate Executive Committee meeting, the Secretary of Senate, Shannon Morrison, typed notes on a laptop, not as a verbatim transcript but as working notes to later prepare meeting minutes. Draft minutes based on those notes were not sent to the Chair of the Senate Executive Committee until July 28, 2025, more than two months after the Committee’s decision had already been made and communicated to Ms. Bilsbury.

Judicial review and the motion on the record
Dissatisfied with the university’s internal decisions, Ms. Bilsbury filed an application for judicial review of the May 9, 2025 decision of the Senate Executive Committee. Before the merits of that judicial review could be heard, a preliminary procedural dispute emerged about the content and form of the “record” to be filed in court. Under Nova Scotia Civil Procedure Rule 7.09, the administrative decision-maker must file a “complete copy of the record,” but the Rules do not define “record.” The parties accepted the general administrative law principle that the record for judicial review consists of the materials that were actually before the decision-making body when it made its decision, and nothing more or less. The university initially filed a record on October 24, 2025. Ms. Bilsbury objected that it was incomplete and moved for an order rejecting that record and replacing it with a record consisting only of the material that was actually before the Senate Executive Committee. In response, the university filed an Amended Record on March 2, 2026, delivered via USB, including additional documents it acknowledged should have been included. Even then, Ms. Bilsbury maintained that the record remained incomplete and raised a series of specific concerns, leading to this motion.

Problems with PDFs, hyperlinks, and electronic materials
The Court’s task was not to decide the merits of the academic dispute but to ensure that the judicial review record was accurate, complete, and properly produced. Several practical evidentiary issues had arisen. First, some PDFs in the Amended Record—including PDFs of Ms. Bilsbury’s reactivation requests—were missing information or not fully displaying content. She sought “fulsome” versions of those documents so the Court would see the same material that the committee had seen. Second, Ms. Bilsbury’s written submissions to the Senate Executive Committee (and an earlier committee) incorporated supporting materials by way of hyperlinks rather than attachments. Some of these hyperlinked documents had been downloaded and included in the Amended Record; others had not. She further advised that some of her links had become broken over time, although she could supply the underlying documents by other means. Third, there were hyperlinks in submissions made by a faculty member, Dr. Gilin, which pointed to SharePoint locations restricted to authorized users, meaning those materials had not appeared in the Amended Record even though they had been accessible to the decision-makers. Finally, the Applicant wanted two specific sets of notes included in the record: the notes of Dorcas Seun-Salami taken at the Senate Committee on Academic Appeals hearing on March 6, 2025, and the notes typed by Shannon Morrison at the May 8, 2025 Senate Executive Committee hearing. At the motion hearing, the university agreed to correct some specific defects: to supply complete PDFs of the two reactivation requests; to ensure all attachments to a key November 30, 2023 email were included and properly associated with that email; to review all hyperlinks in both the Applicant’s and Dr. Gilin’s submissions and download the linked materials; to work with the Applicant to obtain documents where her hyperlinks no longer worked; and to confirm whether the Seun-Salami notes had actually been placed before the Senate Executive Committee. In subsequent written submissions, the university confirmed that the Seun-Salami notes had indeed been provided to the Senate Executive Committee and conceded that those notes therefore formed part of the record and should be included.

Legal framework for defining the record
In resolving the motion, the Court relied on established administrative law principles about the composition of the record on judicial review. Citing earlier Nova Scotia decisions and leading texts, the Court emphasized that the record consists of the documents and evidence that were before the tribunal or decision-maker when it made the impugned decision, including initiating documents, reasons, exhibits, and relevant interim rulings, but excluding settlement communications, privileged materials, drafts, and materials not considered by the decision-maker. It is not the role of the reviewing court to re-try the matter but to review the decision based on that record. Evidence not before the tribunal is presumptively inadmissible except with leave under the fresh-evidence rule (here, Rule 7.28), typically reserved for issues like bias, fraud, improper purpose, absence of evidence for critical factual findings, or procedural unfairness. In this case, both parties agreed that everything actually in front of the Senate Executive Committee should be part of the record and nothing else. The dispute lay in operationalizing that test: determining exactly which electronic documents, hyperlinked files, and notes were in fact before the Committee in May 2025 and ensuring that they were properly captured for the court.

Court’s directions to complete and correct the record
The judge held that the Amended Record filed on March 2, 2026 was still not complete and required further inclusions and clarifications. After reviewing the parties’ oral and written submissions, the Court ordered a concrete set of remedial steps to ensure a proper record. First, all hyperlinked documents included in the submissions of both Ms. Bilsbury and Dr. Gilin were to be obtained, printed, and included in the record, except where the Applicant had identified duplicates that need not be reproduced. The university was required to make best efforts to retrieve each hyperlinked document. Where a hyperlink could not be accessed or the document could not be located despite those efforts, the university had to note that fact in the record index, making clear which document could not be obtained. Second, the university was directed to obtain and include complete and accurate versions of the specific PDFs where content was previously missing, particularly Ms. Bilsbury’s reactivation applications identified at particular tabs of the Amended Record. Third, all attachments to the November 30, 2023 email from Ms. Bilsbury (a key piece of the academic narrative) were to be included under the same tab as the email, so it was evident which attachments were before the decision-maker as part of that communication. Fourth, as the university had conceded, the notes of Dorcas Seun-Salami, which had been provided to and considered by the Senate Executive Committee, were to be added to the record. The judge declined, however, to address perceived minor errors such as mislabelled documents, minor date inaccuracies, or ordering issues. Those issues could be canvassed in the parties’ submissions on the judicial review itself if they became material. The Court made clear that its primary concern at this stage was which documents were to be included in the record, not how they were described or arranged.

Ruling on hearing notes and the minutes
The key evidentiary dispute concerned whether the hearing notes typed by Shannon Morrison and any minutes derived from them should form part of the record. The Court held they should not. Based on Ms. Morrison’s affidavit, her laptop notes were prepared solely to compile minutes and were never before the Senate Executive Committee when it made its May 9, 2025 decision. The notes were distilled into draft minutes that were not even provided to the Committee’s Chair until July 28, 2025, long after the decision had been rendered. Relying on prior case law, the judge reiterated that decision-maker notes and similar informal records are generally not part of the record for judicial review, especially where they are not verbatim transcripts and may contain tentative or evolving impressions. Moreover, because neither the Morrison notes nor the subsequent minutes had been before the Senate Executive Committee at the time of decision, they could not be treated as part of the “record” in this proceeding. If the Applicant wished to rely on them, she would have to bring a separate motion to adduce fresh evidence under Civil Procedure Rule 7.28, satisfying the legal tests for why such additional evidence should be admitted. She had not done so, and her motion before the Court sought only to define and correct the record, not to expand it by fresh evidence. Accordingly, the Court ruled that the Morrison notes and any related minutes would not be included in the record.

Format of the record: electronic versus paper
The Court also addressed how the record should be produced. Originally, the Amended Record had been filed electronically on a USB drive. However, the combination of technical issues—fill-able PDFs not displaying properly, hyperlinks breaking or requiring restricted access, and the lack of a robust court mechanism for handling complex electronic bundles—convinced the judge that a paper record was necessary. To ensure that all participants, including the self-represented Applicant and the Court, were working from the same stable set of documents, the Court ordered that the university prepare and file a complete paper record incorporating the March 2, 2026 Amended Record together with all the specified corrections and additions. This paper record would avoid further technological problems and allow reliable citation of tabs and pages at the eventual judicial review hearing.

Outcome, successful party, and monetary result
This motion produced a mixed result. On one hand, the Court accepted many of Ms. Bilsbury’s concerns about incompleteness and directed the university to correct and supplement the record by including full PDFs, properly associated email attachments, all relevant hyperlinked documents, and the Seun-Salami notes. On the other hand, the Court refused to include the Morrison notes and any associated minutes, declined to alter the ordering or descriptions of documents, and chose a paper format that aligned with the university’s preference after the technical issues became apparent. The university had requested that costs of the motion be awarded in its favour, payable immediately, but the judge refused that request. Given that the original record filed in October 2025 and the Amended Record in March 2026 both contained serious omissions, and recognizing that each side achieved only partial success, the Court concluded that neither party could be characterized as the clear “winner” on this procedural motion. The final order therefore required the university to prepare a corrected paper record with the specified contents, and each party was ordered to bear its own costs. There was no monetary award, no damages, and no quantified costs ordered in favour of either side, so no total amount can be determined for any financial recovery in this decision.