A class action is a procedure that allows one or more representative plaintiffs to bring a claim on behalf of a larger group of people who share common issues. In Ontario class proceedings are governed by the Class Proceedings Act, 1992, which sets out the certification requirements and the procedure for resolving common issues collectively.
In the health context, class actions typically arise not from individual clinical negligence, which depends on patient-specific facts about standard of care and causation, but from systemic matters affecting many people in a similar way, such as defective medical devices or drugs, contaminated products, institutional abuse, or privacy breaches involving large numbers of patient records. Certification turns on whether the claims raise genuinely common issues that a class proceeding can resolve efficiently and fairly.
Posts tagged Class Actions analyze Ontario decisions involving class proceedings arising in the healthcare and patient context.
In the certified Moncton oxytocin class action, a New Brunswick court has ordered the defendant nurse’s personnel file produced, rejected most of the hospital’s quality-improvement privilege claims, and refused to disclose the private health records of other patients. The disclosure reasoning is persuasive only in Ontario, but it tracks the Ontario approach closely.
A cosmetic surgery clinic recorded patients in consultation rooms and the operating room without telling them. In J.C. v Jugenburg, 2026 ONSC 3061, the court awarded $21.5 million in aggregate damages and $1 million in punitive damages, and clarified how intrusion upon seclusion applies inside the doctor-patient relationship.
A proposed class action against the Moncton Hospital and a fired nurse over allegedly unprescribed oxytocin was denied certification because individual issues would predominate.
A BC court certified a class action against a hospital that allegedly hired an imposter nurse. Some causes of action were certified; others were left to individual claims.
The Court of Appeal upholds the use of epidemiological evidence to infer causation across a class of patients harmed by a physician’s IPAC failures.
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