A $3,000 offer, a $46,000 claim - the math didn't add up for double costs.
A British Columbia court refused to award a mortgage broker double costs over a rejected $3,000 settlement offer in a fee dispute.
The ruling, released August 6, 2026, is a costs decision from Justice Schultes of the Supreme Court of British Columbia in New Westminster, following on from an October 23, 2025 judgment (2025 BCSC 2074) that dismissed the underlying claim outright.
Freedom Capital Inc. had sought a $46,000 fee for arranging a mortgage on properties owned by the corporate defendant, 661010 B.C. Ltd. Under the parties' agreement, that fee only became payable if the borrowers "cancelled" the loan. The defendants failed to accept the financing Freedom Capital arranged, but the court found that was not the same thing as cancelling it. The company's principal had turned down a costlier alternative to spread closing fees over time after concluding the business could not afford them, and the judge concluded the company had simply been unable to close, not that it had deliberately walked away.
That finding led to the claim's dismissal, which put the defendants in line to recover their legal costs. In written submissions, the defendants argued they deserved double costs under Rule 9-1(5)(a) of the Supreme Court Civil Rules, pointing to a January 13, 2025 offer to settle the entire claim, including costs, for $3,000. The offer stayed open until January 31, 2025, but the plaintiff never accepted it.
Justice Schultes disagreed that the offer justified a penalty. Weighing the factors set out in Rule 9-1(6), he found the offer had only a marginal relationship to the $46,000 in dispute, calling it "fairly described as a nuisance offer" and noting it came with no explanation of its own rationale. He also rejected the idea that the plaintiff should have recognized, once evidence of the alleged cancellation surfaced through discovery, that its case was doomed and it should have folded. Pursuing the claim on its own theory of the agreement was not unreasonable, even though that theory ultimately failed. The defendants will instead receive ordinary costs at Scale B for the main proceeding, with no costs awarded for the costs application itself, since they lost that argument.
The ruling also cleared the release of $49,243.09 that the defendants' counsel had held in trust since an earlier stage of the case, when the money was paid in to secure the release of a certificate of pending litigation the plaintiff had registered against the properties.
For brokers and lenders who write fee agreements triggered by a borrower's specific conduct, the case is a reminder that vague trigger language invites this kind of dispute, and that a settlement offer needs a real connection to the amount in play, and some stated rationale, to carry weight at the costs stage.
