Civil litigation in Toronto.

Where a claim is issued is among the first decisions in a civil case and among the easiest to get wrong. Ontario runs civil claims through three forums with three sets of rules, and the amount in issue largely decides which one applies. A claim brought in the wrong place can cost the successful party its costs, which is a poor way to lose money in a case you have won.

Since 1 October 2025, the Small Claims Court hears claims up to $50,000, exclusive of interest and costs, raised from the long-standing $35,000 limit. O. Reg. 626/00, as amended by O. Reg. 42/25 The appeal threshold to the Divisional Court rose at the same time, from $3,500 to $5,000. Toronto's Small Claims Court sits on Sheppard Avenue East, not downtown, which surprises people who assume every civil matter is heard on University Avenue.

Above that limit, a claim goes to the Superior Court of Justice. If the amount sought is $200,000 or less, or the parties agree to it, the action runs under the Simplified Procedure in Rule 76, which compresses discovery and restricts what can be done at trial. Everything above $200,000 runs under the ordinary procedure. In Toronto, civil matters are filed and heard on University Avenue, with the Commercial List, bankruptcy and estates offices in a separate building from the main civil court.

The forum choice carries a costs sanction that is easy to overlook. A plaintiff who recovers an amount within the Small Claims jurisdiction after suing in the Superior Court can be denied costs altogether, and the Simplified Procedure carries a comparable discipline. It is worth pleading a claim at what it is genuinely worth rather than at whatever figure read most forcefully in the demand letter.

Appeals from the Superior Court go to the Divisional Court or to the Court of Appeal for Ontario depending on the order and the amount, and both sit at Osgoode Hall. Which route applies is a question that has to be answered before the appeal period runs, not after.

For years, Toronto was where a great many Ontario actions were issued regardless of where the dispute arose, because counsel were here, the lists were familiar, and nothing much turned on it. That changed on 1 February 2026, when amendments to the Rules of Civil Procedure came into force requiring that the venue chosen for a proceeding have a rational connection to the dispute.

The practical effect is that venue is now a pleaded position rather than an administrative default. A proceeding placed in Toronto for convenience or for tactical advantage, with no connection to where the parties are, where the contract was performed, or where the loss occurred, is exposed to a transfer order and to costs.

The same tranche of amendments introduced mandatory prescribed forms for certain motions and appeals, and required that the mode of attendance be selected explicitly on the form rather than left to default. These are small things individually. Together they mean that filings prepared from an old precedent bank will be rejected, and a rejected filing does not extend a deadline.

The connecting facts are the ordinary ones: where the defendant carries on business, where the agreement was made or was to be performed, where the loss was suffered. They should appear in the claim rather than being left to inference, because they are now doing work that they were not doing before.

Rule 24.1 of the Rules of Civil Procedure requires most civil actions commenced in the City of Toronto to go to mediation. The same requirement applies in Ottawa and in the County of Essex, and nowhere else in the province, which is why counsel who practise mainly outside those three jurisdictions are sometimes caught out by it.

The rule says that the mediation session is to take place within 180 days after the first defence is filed. Rule 24.1.09(1) That figure is widely quoted and it is a poor description of how Toronto actions are actually run. The parties can postpone the session by filing a consent with the mediation coordinator, and the court can order otherwise, in some cases extending the deadline until after the action has been set down for trial. Consents and orders of that sort are routine rather than exceptional.

The reason is a matter of professional convention rather than of law. A good part of the Toronto bar takes the view that mediating before documentary and oral discovery are complete accomplishes very little, because until the documents have been exchanged and the witnesses examined neither side can put a defensible value on the case. A mediation held in that state of knowledge often produces nothing except a bill from the mediator. The common pattern, accordingly, is that mediation is scheduled once discoveries are done and frequently in the run-up to the pre-trial conference.

Where the rule does bite is at the point of setting the action down for trial. In the Toronto Region a lawyer's certificate has to be filed at that stage confirming that the mediation session has been held, or that the action has been exempted by order, or that the deadline has been extended past the setting down. An action cannot be moved toward trial while that certificate is outstanding, so the obligation is real even though the 180-day period usually is not observed.

Some proceedings sit outside Rule 24.1 altogether. Actions placed on the Commercial List are exempt, as are mortgage actions, most construction matters and bankruptcy proceedings, and a party can move under Rule 24.1.05 to exempt a particular action where a mediation would serve no purpose.

None of which makes the timing a matter of indifference to a client. Agreeing to the usual postponement is agreeing to reach the same conversation by a longer and more expensive route, and there are files where that is the wrong trade. Where the dispute turns on documents both sides already hold, or where one party has a cash flow problem that a settlement would solve, an early mediation can end the matter for a fraction of what discoveries cost. Whether a particular case is one of those is worth asking at the pleadings stage rather than following the usual timetable because it is the usual timetable.

The Commercial List is a specialist list of the Superior Court that sits only in Toronto. It is staffed by judges with commercial experience and it takes a defined class of work: corporate and shareholder disputes including oppression applications, insolvency and receivership proceedings, arrangements, and commercial matters that need judicial attention faster than the ordinary list can provide it.

Two features make it worth seeking out where a case qualifies. The first is expertise. Argument on a shareholders' agreement or a receivership does not have to begin at first principles. The second is speed and continuity: the List is built to handle urgent motions and to keep a proceeding in front of judges familiar with it.

Because Commercial List actions are exempt from Rule 24.1, placing a matter on the List also removes the mediation requirement, which is a consideration in its own right. Whether to seek the List is worth deciding early in the proceeding rather than discovering later that the moment for it has passed.

Urgent relief is a large part of what the List is for. Freezing orders, disclosure orders against banks and other third parties, preservation orders and interlocutory injunctions are heard here, sometimes without notice and sometimes within a day or two of the material being assembled. For a party whose counterparty is moving money that speed is the entire point, and it is one of the practical reasons a commercial dispute with a genuine Toronto connection is often better placed here than elsewhere in the province.

A fair number of Ontario claims end without anyone reaching the merits, and two provisions are usually responsible.

The first is the basic limitation period. A claim must generally be commenced within two years of the day it was discovered, subject to an ultimate period of fifteen years running from the act or omission. Limitations Act, 2002, ss. 4 and 15 Discoverability does genuine work in commercial cases, where a loss is often caused well before anybody notices it, but it is a thin thing to rely on. Whether a reasonable person in the plaintiff's position ought to have known earlier gets decided by a judge some years afterwards, on a record the defendant has had every reason to assemble.

The second is dismissal for delay. Where an action has not been set down for trial or otherwise disposed of within the prescribed period, the registrar issues a status notice and the action is dismissed if nothing is done in response. Restoring an action dismissed for delay requires an acceptable explanation for the delay and evidence that the defendant has not been prejudiced by it, and those motions are harder to win than clients tend to assume.

Neither provision has anything to do with the strength of the case, which is why the most useful thing a client can do on the day something goes wrong is to make a note of what happened, when they learned of it, and what they did next. That note costs nothing at the time and is often the difference between a limitation argument that can be answered and one that cannot.

Ontario civil procedure is in the middle of its largest rewrite in decades, and anyone commencing a proceeding now should understand where it stands. The Civil Rules Review was launched in January 2024 by the Chief Justice of the Superior Court and the Attorney General. It published a consultation paper in April 2025 and a final policy report on 15 December 2025.

The report proposes to replace the current single procedure with a three-track model: an application track for statutory matters, a summary track for claims between $50,000 and $500,000, and a trial track for everything else. It also proposes pre-litigation protocols requiring the exchange of information before a claim is issued, an up-front evidence model that moves disclosure to the pleadings stage in place of much of traditional documentary discovery, and significant limits on oral examinations for discovery.

None of that is fully in force. The February 2026 amendments described above are the first tranche, and as at the date in the colophon below the larger structural changes were still working their way through the regulatory process. Anyone reading a confident statement that the new regime applies, on this page or anywhere else, should check the date it was written.

The direction is consistent, though: earlier disclosure, tighter timetables and less patience with procedural manoeuvring. A client who puts the documents and the chronology together at the outset will be well placed under the new rules and is no worse off under the current ones, which makes it a reasonably safe thing to do while the position settles.

For anyone weighing a claim or facing one, the practical response is much what it has always been. Assemble the record early, work out what the case is really about, and take a sober view of what it is worth. An intake form is the sensible way to begin that conversation.