A former Royal Bank of Canada teller has lost his appeal against the dismissal of a claim that the bank misappropriated his intellectual property in developing its Borealis artificial intelligence initiatives. The British Columbia Court of Appeal found no reversible error in the conclusion that the claim presented no genuine issue for trial.
The October 8 ruling in Krishan v Royal Bank of Canada, 2026 BCCA 431, concerns only the intellectual property component of Sukhdev Krishan’s wider employment lawsuit. It does not dispose of his other pleaded claims concerning the end of his employment, including constructive dismissal, retaliation and discrimination.
Krishan worked as a client advisor or teller at RBC’s Port Alberni branch beginning in November 2013. The evidence included emails from 2015 proposing recorded promotional messages between music played in the branch and a booth at a local fall fair. He stopped performing work for RBC in May 2016 but remained an employee until January 2024. RBC founded Borealis in Toronto in September 2016 and expanded it to Vancouver in 2018.
Evidence did not connect the proposals to Borealis
Krishan alleged that he had contributed ideas involving artificial intelligence and machine learning, including client insights, fraud detection and operational efficiency, without acknowledgment or fair compensation. His earlier affidavits referred to a retained proposal that was not attached. Later affidavits identified the 2015 emails as the proposal. The appeal court noted that their contents did not concern the AI functions he described.
RBC supplied evidence that Krishan had never been involved in Borealis, that its head had not received or used any idea from him or another employee at the Port Alberni branch, and that its work was developed by its own team. It also said Borealis had not developed advertising methods of the kind described in the emails.
The chambers judge found no evidentiary connection between the proposals and Borealis. The assertion that the emails had moved further up RBC’s management chain and become the basis for its AI software was unsupported. The judge accepted the bank’s material evidence as uncontradicted, and the appeal court found no basis to interfere with that assessment.
The judge also examined the possible legal bases for the claim. On copyright, he found that Krishan had shown ideas rather than original work connected to anything copied or used by Borealis. On patent infringement, Krishan had not alleged that he owned a patent. A possible claim for breach of confidence or misuse of confidential information lacked the necessary pleaded facts and supporting evidence of use by Borealis.
Summary judgment still required a high threshold
Krishan argued on appeal that the judge had improperly weighed evidence, treated disputed matters as established and effectively required him to prove his claim before trial. He maintained that the emails could be part of a broader innovation concept connected to the bank’s later AI work.
Justice Fleming, delivering the appeal court’s oral reasons, rejected those arguments while reaffirming the demanding standard governing RBC’s application. Under Rule 9-6, showing that a claim has little merit is insufficient. The applicant must establish that there is no genuine issue for trial and the claim is bound to fail. A judge cannot weigh competing evidence, assess credibility or draw adverse inferences against the responding party.
The court found that the chambers judge had stayed within the permitted inquiry: deciding whether Krishan’s evidence materially contradicted RBC’s evidence. Read as a whole, the reasons showed that the judge understood both the rule and the burden on RBC. References to a summary trial and to Krishan showing some merit did not demonstrate that the wrong procedure or burden had been applied.
RBC had succeeded on both available routes identified in the reasons: the pleaded intellectual property case was legally unsound, and the bank’s evidence supplied a complete answer to it. The appeal did not identify a reversible error in that conclusion.
Requests for more records did not save this claim
Krishan also said the decision was premature because discovery was incomplete and he had not received all the emails and records he sought. At the appeal hearing, he referred to additional work emails containing material ideas, but the affidavit evidence he identified showed requests for searches rather than evidence describing those further ideas or their transmission.
The court noted that he could have sought further document production before bringing his own earlier summary judgment application, which he ultimately chose not to pursue at the hearing. More fundamentally, further discovery would not supply his own missing account of ideas he knew he had developed or facts connecting them to Borealis. Those matters could have been pleaded or addressed in his evidence.
The judge had to decide RBC’s application on the pleadings and evidence actually presented. On that record, the court upheld dismissal of the intellectual property claim and dismissed the appeal. The ruling did not determine the other components of Krishan’s employment action.
