Civil procedure professors: Please tell your students to read this ruling
I've had to sit through motion hearings in which most of the time is spent by the motions judge patiently explaining to a young lawyer how Small Claims Court works.
Professors devote no time to the inferior court. (One of my own intructors called in "kindergarten court.") I get it, but lawyers are going to continue wasting the court's time and their clients' money.
Faraz v Hamid Auto Service Inc., 2025 CanLII 101459 (ON SCSM) is a ruling on a Rule 12.02 motion to strike an Amended Plaintiff's Claim. The moving party had submitted that the Claim should be dismissed because the plaintiff had neither 1) identified a cause of action nor 2) submitted evidence in support of her Claim.
Caston DJ kindly explains why the motion was never going to succeed.
He reviews the law, and he concludes that "a court will strike or dismiss a pleading only with great caution, sparingly and only where it is abundantly clear that there is no action" (10).
He explains that no evidence need be provided with the Claim, and he acknowledges that no cause is specifically named.
But he cites the Divisional Court:
The higher standards of pleading in the Superior Court are simply unworkable in the Small Claims Court, where litigants are routinely unrepresented, and where legal concepts such as the many varieties of causes of action are completely foreign to the parties. Essentially, the litigants present a set of facts to the deputy judge, and it is left to the deputy judge to determine the legal issues that emerge from those facts and bring his or her legal expertise to bear in resolving those issues. (45)
And he examines the pleading in question. (Faraz had brought the claim because, she alleged, the mechanic had not returned her car's summer tires. He'd given her a mix of other people's tires and apparently refused to cooperate further.)
He finds four torts:
- Deceit or Civil Fraud
- Negligence
- Wrongful Conversion
- Wrongful Detinue
He states: "any one of them stands a reasonable and meaningful chance of success at trial" (32). Thus, Rule 12.02(1)(a) does not apply.
He dismisses the motion and awards the standard $100 to the plaintiff.
A plaintiff can avoid hearings like this one if they have a (para)professional review their pleading before serving it. And, professors, I will be happy to deliver a 30-minute overview of the Small Claims Court to your students!