The Ontario Superior Court of Justice is the trial court of general jurisdiction for civil matters in the province, and the court where almost all medical malpractice actions are heard. Claims for more than $35,000 begin in the Superior Court rather than the Small Claims Court, and the vast majority of medical malpractice cases proceed there given the complexity of the evidence and the size of the damages typically at issue.
The Superior Court hears motions, pre-trial conferences, and trials governed by the Rules of Civil Procedure, including the expert evidence requirements in Rule 53.03 and the summary judgment framework refined by the Supreme Court of Canada in Hryniak v Mauldin, 2014 SCC 7, [2014] 1 SCR 87. Appeals from the Superior Court go to the Divisional Court or directly to the Court of Appeal for Ontario depending on the nature of the order.
Posts tagged Ontario Superior Court of Justice summarize trial and motion decisions from the court in medical malpractice matters, with particular attention to how judges have applied the standard-of-care, causation, and damages frameworks to specific clinical fact patterns.
Ontario Superior Court finds pediatric neurologists negligent for delayed pyridoxine treatment in PDE. The low-risk alternative framework and twin sister causation.
Justice Williams awards over $1M in costs against the unsuccessful plaintiff in the Lyme disease malpractice trial. The defendant-win costs framework in Ontario.
When a surgical complication is extreme and rare, the trier of fact can infer negligence from the outcome itself. Trial win on shoulder replacement nerve injury.
A 17-day birth injury trial. Battery, informed consent, five negligence allegations, and causation all addressed and rejected. A multi-ground defence dismissal.
A delayed Lyme disease claim against two Ontario physicians dismissed on multiple grounds, including the most fundamental: the plaintiff failed to prove he had Lyme disease.
An Ontario orthopaedic surgeon was found liable after removing clavicle hardware six weeks early without revisiting his own documented treatment plan.
A motion to extend the time for service of a malpractice claim was denied. Two key defence witnesses had died or become incapacitated during the delay.
A young mother left in a permanent vegetative state after C-section. The court found anesthesiology negligence but accepted that an amniotic fluid embolism was the unavoidable cause.
On December 1, 2023, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice dismissed a medical malpractice lawsuit brought by a young woman who suffered a stroke after taking birth control medication provided by her family physician who allegedly failed to advise her of the increased risk of stroke associated with that particular brand of birth control pill (Yaz).
A 27-year-old woman died from a missed cerebellar stroke after an ER discharge. The malpractice claim was dismissed when the plaintiff’s expert evidence unravelled at trial.
A defence motion for a neuropsychological assessment was refused eight years after the statement of defence in a complex pediatric malpractice case.
A 12-day Brampton trial led to a finding that an ER physician’s failure to call a patient back after new diagnostic information caused her death.
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