Viscount Haldane:-

In this case their Lordships are called on to interpret and apply the implications of a judgment, delivered by the Judicial Committee on 2nd November, 1914, in John Deere Plow Company v. Wharton (1), It was then laid down that the British North America Act of 1867 had so enabled the Parliament of the Dominion to prescribe the extent of the powers of companies incorporated under Dominion law with objects which extended to the Dominion generally, that the status and powers so far as there in question of one of the three appellant companies could not, as matter of principle be validly interfered with by the Provincial Legislature of British Columbia.

It was held that laws which had been passed by the Legislature of that Province, and which sought to compel a Dominion Company to obtain a certain kind of Provincial licence or to be registered in the way brought before the Judicial Committee, as a condition of exercising its powers in the Province or of suing in its Courts, were ultra vires. The reason given was that their Lordships interpreted what had been done by the Province in that case as interfering in a manner not consistent with the principles laid down with the