Seacoast Fisheries & Canning, of Signal Bay, Nova Scotia entered into a contract with SEAINTORG, a Russian government-owned foreign trade organization for marine products, to process and can Russian off-shore catch. Due to the movement of fish up the Canadian coast, SEAINTORG suspends the agreement, and has its catch canned by operations in Newfoundland. What alternatives are open to SFC other than Canadian courts, and how does the process operate?

The alternative to court action is redress through commercial arbitration. For this to be possible, the original contract must have made reference to the option for commercial arbitration. In practical terms the original contract would also have had to include the mechanism for the commercial arbitration to operate under. The mechanism must be at least defined to the extent of how an arbitration board is to be selected, and if there are not special rules unique to the parties that they want arbitrators to use in resolving disputes, then one of the general sets of rules (often the United Nations UNCITRAL rules) must be specified. The parties could in the alternative specify that the arbitrators are to use the rules of law of a particular legal jurisdiction (such as Nova Scotia or the Russia) just as though the matter was being handled by the courts, but without the attendant time and expense.
The board will be selected in accordance with the original contract, usually a panel of three, one each appointed by the parties alone and the third by agreement. Once the board has made its decision under the specified set of rules, the party which has succeeded can set out to have the award enforced, if there is not voluntary compliance. In this case the likely succeeding party would be SFC, and they could seek to enforce their award in the Federal Court, or the appropriate Nova Scotia court with jurisdiction in the amount of damages awarded by the arbitration board. Once the award is filed, it would be enforced upon by the seizure and sale of a Russian vessel by a local sheriff if one ventures into a Canadian port, or the seizure of the canned product in Newfoundland.