Ontario v Doe: The 30 Hour Lawsuit

If you think civil lawsuits take way too long in Canada, you’re in good company. But one high-profile suit recently went from claim to final hearing in less than 30 hours. Ontario v Doe was certainly an unusual case, and one that has been widely debated for reasons that have nothing to do with civil procedure. And yet it also offers three important lessons for people who care about making justice speedier in mainstream civil litigation.

The Facts: A Last-Minute Injunction

A rally was planned for the afternoon of Saturday March 14th, on University Avenue in downtown Toronto. Just before 3pm on the day before (March 13), Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that he would instruct the Attorney General to seek an injunction forbidding the rally.

Ontario’s application record and factum were sent to the Superior Court of Justice at 10:52 a.m. the next morning. Responding materials from the event organizers arrived at 11:44 a.m.

The Hearing: in a Hurry

The oral hearing started before Justice Robert Centa at noon, just three hours before the rally was planned to begin.

An awkward moment occurred early on. The law is clear that Attorneys-General are to act independently, and yet the Premier had told the Province the day before that he had “instructed” the AG to bring the application that was now being brought. Justice Centa asked about this, and accepted the representation of the AG’s lawyer that the decision to bring the application was the AG’s alone.

After two hours of submissions and questions, Justice Centa dismissed the Attorney General’s application at 2:05 pm. His Honour’s written reasons were released before the end of the day.

The Decision

Justice Centa found “no evidence” in the record that the rally would attract or encourage violence, or that it would create any material risk of injury (at para 21). Freedom of peaceful assembly is guaranteed by section 2(c) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the police were already mandated to respond to any criminality that might occur. For these reasons, the application to pre-emptively cancel the rally was dismissed.

The premise of the decision — that the police would be able to handle any problems arising from the rally — seems to have been vindicated. Two individuals involved in a counter-protest were arrested for relatively minor offences, but media accounts of indicate no injuries or damage to property.

Why Ontario v. Doe Matters: not for Con Law, but for Civ Pro

The case will not make it into any constitutional law books. No new law was developed, and it wasn’t a “close call” delineating the boundaries of the law. A quia timet injunction against Charter-protected assembly requires strong evidence, and according to Jutice Centa’s reasons the applicant’s record came nowhere close.

However, I do plan to teach Ontario v. Doe in my civil procedure class, for two reasons.

1. A Minimum Viable Product for Civil Procedure?

First, it proves just how quickly a case can get from “glimmer in the client’s eye” to final adjudication. Slowness is considered by many to be the biggest problem with the civil justice system in Canada.

Ontario’s Civil Rules Review is trying to cut the timeline-to-trial for the average civil case in half, from the current 4 or 5 years down to 24 months. Some observers doubt this is possible, without a major infusion of new judicial resources.

Ontario v Doe demonstrated that justice can be done in about 30 hours, or roughly 1/700th of the average time-to-trial sought by the Civil Rules Review. Of course it was an exceptional case, a purported emergency, and the procedure applied to it was not as thorough as it might have been. And yet, this procedure might be considered a “minimum viable product” for those trying to devise a workflow for civil lawsuits that is both quick and just.

In software development, the minimum viable product is the version stripped down to only its most essential elements. After an MVP is developed, more features can be added, if and only if their benefit can be proven to justify the costs they add in time and money.

Ontario v Doe included the essential bits of civil procedure: pleadings, evidence, argument, adjudication, and written reasons.

An interesting experiment would be to start with Ontario v Doe’s 30-hour procedure and then determine the necessary additions to make it viable for a broader variety of cases, instead of trying to find stages that can be cut from the current five-year timeline.

2. A Benchmark for Quick Work?

The blistering pace of Ontario v Doe might also be a useful benchmark, for evaluating the more leisurely efforts of justice system participants in other cases.

• Justice Centa drafted written reasons, which seem reasonably thorough to this reader, in six hours after the hearing on March 14th. Must we really allow six months (730 times as long) as the timeline for judges to release written reasons, as do the Canadian Judicial Council’s Ethical Principles (at page 27)?
• If the lawyers in Ontario v Doe prepared serviceable factums overnight, should any factum require dozens of billable hours, stretching over many weeks, for counsel to prepare?

The answer to both these questions might be “yes.” And yet this model of speedy justice switches the onus to justify more time-consuming efforts, in a provocative and helpful way.

3. Why People Litigate

The third lesson from Ontario v Doe, for students of civil procedure, is about why civil claims are brought in the first place. Civil procedure assumes that, in general, a party litigates because they believe their position has legal merit. It also assumes that parties are interested in settling, and will welcome opportunities to do on a reasonable basis.

Ontario v Doe is a reminder that some civil claimants don’t want to settle, may not believe they are correct in law, and may not even want to win. They may be litigating mostly to send a message to a group or constituency not directly involved in the case.

Starting a lawsuit can:

(i) Garner political or material support from other opponents of the defendant,

(ii) Make the claimant appear to be a victim of wrongdoing or agent of justice, and/or

(iii) Deflect critical attention away from the claimant’s own conduct, toward the defendant.

Pursuing such goals is more attractive if, as in Ontario v Doe, the legal fees can be paid by someone else (i.e. the taxpayers of Ontario). Such a litigation strategy would also be made more attractive by the fact that, for reasons that not entirely clear to the author, Justice Centa made no costs award against the unsuccessful applicant.

Going to Court in Good Faith?

There are a few reasons to question whether this particular application might have been not only unfounded in law, but also brought in less-than-impeccable-faith:

• If Ontario genuinely believed the rally posed a threat to public safety or fostered hate speech, it could have brought its injunction application much sooner than 24 hours beforehand. The timing of the March 14 rally was predictable, given that its predecessor events had occurred every year in Toronto for over a decade.
• If seeking in good faith to protect public safety, Ontario would probably have sought to negotiate with the rally organizers to address its concerns on a consensual basis, before resorting to litigation.
• It could also have introduced legislation to refine the balance between Charter freedoms and public safety or the prevention of hate speech, not only for this protest, but for all others going forward.

The loss in court might not have been unanticipated or even unwelcome. The Premier was able to declare himself “extremely disappointed” in the outcome, and file the government’s “effort” to prevent the rally for future highly targeted political communications. The entire episode seemed to be complete in one news cycle, until a new chapter unexpectedly dropped in May of 2026. The organizers of the rally are now suing the Premier for defamation, based on the March 13th news conference which started it all.

For civil-proceduralists, the good news from Ontario v Doe is that it is possible in principle to do civil justice much faster than we are doing it in the average case today. The bad news is that starting civil lawsuits will always be appealing to some whose motives are far indeed from the legitimate purpose of civil procedure.