In early 2025, a British Columbia Supreme Court judge sitting in Victoria confronted a question that precedes any examination of the merits in an oppression application: whether the party seeking relief is entitled to walk through the courthouse door at all. The numbered holding company incorporated in Ontario in September 2016 had positioned itself as a complainant under the Business Corporations Act of British Columbia, alleging that the publicly traded mining firm headquartered in Victoria, British Columbia had conducted its affairs in a manner oppressive to minority shareholders. The mining firm's response was not to defend the substance of those allegations but to attack the threshold inquiry. It argued that the numbered company, and the individual behind it, had never acquired shares for the purpose of participating in the corporation as genuine investors. Instead, the respondent contended, the September 2016 share acquisition was a deliberate mechanism to manufacture standing, to arm the numbered company with the technical status of a security holder so that it could deploy the oppression remedy as a weapon in a broader campaign of litigation. The dispute had already produced 5 separate court proceedings across 2 provinces, stretching from 2017 through 2018 and into 2024, and the standing challenge in 2025 forced the court to determine whether the complainant's conduct across that procedural history disqualified it from invoking the statutory remedy at all.