I’m delighted to announce that the updated 2022 edition of Civil Procedure & Practice in Ontario is now live at https://www.canlii.org/en/commentary/81787.
We are also grateful to our publishers CanLII, and in particular the team of Sarah Sutherland, Alex Tsang, and Alicia Lazear. Assistant Editor Sheldon Leung and our Windsor Law editorial team (introduced below) were essential to the success of this project.
For a list of Professor Semple’s publications as of July 2020, please click below.
@noel.semple7 Should hard liquor banner ads be allowed on this neighbourhood corner?
Text:
One of the biggest questions we face as a society is, how can we make capitalism work for all of us and not just for the capitalists? Some people honestly believe the answer to that question is “we can’t.” But I disagree, because if you look back through human history, all of the times and places where it’s been best to live as a human being are those in which capitalism has been combined with regulation, redistribution of income and social programs.
Capitalism is a goose that lays golden eggs, but government has got to make sure that that goose doesn’t bite people and has got to make sure that the golden eggs are enjoyed by all of us and not just by a privileged elite. This, incidentally, is a major theme of my new book, The State of happiness, which is coming out this fall.
I was thinking about this today when I was driving by this strip mall at the corner of Bloor and Kipling
here in beautiful central Etobicoke because the landlord has rented out space on the fence that goes around the strip mall to these advertisers.
So there’s eight advertising banners that have been attached to the fence here. And advertising and the regulation of it is a small but an interesting part of this bigger question of how we make capitalism work for all of us. Advertising has a healthy function in a free-market, capitalist economy because it lets consumers know what’s available and it promotes competition, which in turn leads to lower prices,
higher quality and more choice. And that’s why advertising or “commercial speech,” as it’s known to lawyers, is protected in many cases by our Constitution. But governments also have the legal right and the moral obligation to regulate advertising and in some cases to forbid it.
I’ve talked on this channel before about the need to ban ads for internet gambling, which is a dangerous, highly addictive product which targets young people. And I think our government is asleep at the switch
if it thinks we can just have unregulated, free-for-all advertising for that particular product.
I think these billboards at 3810 Bloor street west are an interesting case study for healthy and unhealthy advertising. Four of these banner ads advertise businesses which are actually in the plaza. And they let us consumers know what’s available and they help our local small business entrepreneurs thrive.
But two of these ads are very different. First of all, they’re for liquor, which like internet gambling, is a addictive product.
And more importantly, they are here right in the middle of the neighbourhood. And yet they do not promote or let us know about our local businesses. They are for selling things where the profits are going to be captured by large multinational corporations. And I think if we’re looking for a place to draw the line for what type of ads, we should be allowing on a street corner. We could start by saying that anything for local businesses is okay, but if you’re advertising some consumer product that’s is gonna be sold elsewhere where the profits are gonna go elsewhere and the only real value of it is adding a little bit of money for the landlord’s bottom line, especially when it’s for something dangerous and addictive like alcohol, then, that would be the type of banner that we should not necessarily allow.
And so I’m gonna look into this. I’m sure there’s laws and bylaws about this and I’ll keep you postedon my efforts to see why this is allowed and if perhaps it’s something that should be removed.
@noel.semple7 We need more Canadians making their own jobs and making jobs for others. Like my kids are doing this sunmer!
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Last week almost 50,000 people applied for 5,000 jobs at the CNE, and then thousands showed up in person for this in-person job fair.
And it’s a tough summer for young people looking for work. Ontario’s youth unemployment rate is 16.2% ,which is one of the highest in the country. To make that situation better, we need more hiring but we also need more entrepreneurship.
And this is where I take off my Ontario Policy guy hat and put on my proud father hat because both of my kids, who are teenagers, created their own jobs this summer.
My daughter who is 18 was walking around the neighbourhood and noticed that there are a lot of lawns that seem to need help, a lot of people who need to seem seem to need help with weeds in particular.
And so she started a weed pulling business. She just printed up a bunch of these signs. And within a week or two had all the clients she could handle and she just goes there and picks weeds for 20 or 25 bucks an hour, and it’s great.
Meanwhile, my son who is 13 is out right now selling soft drinks in parks. He’s also collected golf balls and sold them back to golf courses, and he’s cleaned people’s garbage bins for money, and he’s also working on selling a website development services to local small businesses.
So this type of thing, Entrepreneurship and business formation, is something where Canada lags behind some other countries and the United States in particular.
And I don’t know exactly how the government can help make people more willing to start businesses and create jobs for themselves and then go on to employ others. But if we could narrow that gap and create more of an entrepreneurial culture and mindset among Canadians of all ages, then we would go a long way towards building the economy that we need to create a great life for everyone here.
@noel.semple7 Dad of school shooter sentenced to 15 years. Fair, or no?
Transcription:
Yesterday, in the US state of Georgia, Colin Gray was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment after a 2024 school shooting that left 4 people dead, which seems about right until you read that Colin Gray did not shoot anyone. He didn’t tell anyone to shoot anyone, and he had no idea that there was going to be a shooting at all.
It was his son, 14-year-old Colt Gray, who committed this atrocity, and Colt Gray was sentenced earlier this week to life imprisonment. Colin, the dad, was sentenced yesterday because he had failed to recognize and respond appropriately to some red flag behaviors from his son, and because he had given his son a hunting rifle at Christmas and failed to take it away like he really should have after some of those red flag behaviors from Colt.
Was this bad parenting?
Absolutely.
Should it be punished?
Absolutely.
But I just can’t see how 15 years could possibly be a proportionate penalty when people who commit actual murders, both in Georgia and in Canada, are often sentenced to 15 years or less. And if the system is not going to be proportionate, then it’s not going to impose time that suits the crime.
But what about deterrence?
Do these stiff penalties cause all parents to pay more attention and reduce the chance that they’ll ignore red flags the way Colin Gray did?
It doesn’t seem like it will.
Deterrence is real. People actually do avoid breaking the law because they don’t want to get punished. But if something is already illegal and it already has a serious penalty attached to it, all of the studies
suggest that ramping the penalty up further is not going to increase deterrence. If you want to increase deterrence, you’ve got to increase people’s perceived risk of getting caught. You’ve got to make sure that The punishment follows quickly and certainly after you are caught, and often you’ve just
got to help people avoid the illegal behavior in the first place when they don’t want to be breaking the
law either, but they may be careless or they may just not be focused on what’s necessary to stay on
the right side of the law.
I think that sentences like 15 years for careless parenting come from the gut. And they come from a deep, real human sense of fear and anger and desire for revenge after a horrible crime takes place.
And those are natural and virtuous human emotions. But everything the government does needs to come from the head and from the heart, not so much from the gut. We need to be taking steps that are actually going to minimize as much as humanly possible the chance of these things happening going forward.
And that means getting smart about deterring crime.
It means helping people stay on the right side of the law, and it means investing in a social safety
net and in our schools so that when kids fall through the cracks because their parents have screwed up, we’re not all put at risk because there’s other caring professionals who are there to catch that person before they fall through the cracks and become a threat to the rest of us.
Everything the government does needs to be evidence-based and rational, and these human emotions and responses need to be honoured and taken seriously, but they can’t drive policy because we’ll end up not only with punishments which are frankly grossly disproportionate and cruel and unusual, but we’ll end up with criminal justice policy that does not keep us safe in the long run.
@noel.semple7 Telcos make HUGE profits, won’t hire enough people to answer customer calls … time for a law requiring better service standards??
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This beautiful sound is the sound of me on hold with Rogers for 43 minutes trying to get them to answer a call about why our internet’s not working.
It’s the middle of a weekday. This is a company that made $5.6 billion in profit in the last quarter, and they can’t hire enough people to answer calls.
In Spain, there’s a law now that requires tech companies and telecoms to answer service calls in 3 minutes.
Sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
@noel.semple7 Will September 3 be the beginning of the end of the Doug Ford government?
Prof. Noel Semple, of the University of Windsor Faculty of Law, is seeking 10 students to test an innovative online practice simulation. If you have taken an employment law course, and are available for 90 minutes (online) on an evening in August, please email nsemple@uwindsor.ca
$50 Starbucks or Tim Hortons card for each participant.
A great chance to practice your skills with an interesting new way to master law.
@noel.semple7 Why is Brad Bradford, supposedly the public safety candidate for Mayor of Toronto, picking a fight with the police?
@noel.semple7 OMG I’m in Sankofa Square and it turns out it’s not a dangerous wasteland like Brad Bradford said
@noel.semple7 School makes us stronger 💪
@noel.semple7 In memoriam for the three children killed by a speeder at this intersection last year. New data confirms that speeding and traffic deaths way up Toronto after speed cameras were ripped out last year. Thanks Premier Ford!
Slaw.ca, May 29 2026 https://www.slaw.ca/2026/05/29/ontario-v-doe-the-30-hour-lawsuit/
If you think civil lawsuits take way too long in Canada, you’re in goodcompany. 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.
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 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.
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-protestwere arrested for relatively minor offences, but media accounts of indicate no injuries or damage to property.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Delighted to announce the publication of Child Support Law in Canada on CanLII: https://canlii.ca/t/7nsqj. This is the first and only open-access, comprehensive guide to the law of child support across the country. It has been such a pleasure to work with Prof. Shelley Kierstead of York University – Osgoode Hall Law School as co-editors of this project. (And thanks also to University of Windsor Faculty of Law for letting me work on interesting projects that don’t generate any SSHRC money or peer-reviewed publications 😁 )
But the “stars of this show” are our incredible chapter authors, some of the finest family lawyers in Canada: Frances E. Chapman, Katherine Cooligan, Duncan Dagley, Jasmine Dong, Denniel Duong, Sarah Harland, Haley Hrymak, Kiarash Izadifar, Georgialee Lang BA JD FCIArb, Elysia Martini, Ken Nathens, Kaylee Ness, Kayleigh Pink, Vanessa Lam, Irfan Reayat, & Rebecca Winninger.
Please spread the word, and keep Child Support Law in Canada https://canlii.ca/t/7nsqj in mind for all your CS-related legal knowledge needs!
@noel.semple7 Can’t we do better than this pigeon-infested, ceilingless tunnel ar Islington TTC, where people are expected to travel and work all day? I’m going to find out.
♬ original sound – Noel Semple
@noel.semple7 What I learned from calling the TTC about the ceilingless pigeon feather tunnel at Islington
@noel.semple7 Better Buses for the ‘Burbs: my idea featured in Toronto Star this week #IfIWereMayor ♬ original sound – Noel Semple
I had a fun day on the bus, and waiting for the bus, and trying to get through the pigeon poop to the bus!
@noel.semple7 A tour of urgent central Etobicoke infrastructure needs… the billions being wasted on Doug Ford’s Mistakes by the Lake could do a lot more good spread across the province!
♬ original sound – Noel Semple
Transcript:
They say that everyone who makes it to the top eventually forgets where they came from, and forgets the people who helped them rise.
It’s just a question of when.
And this neighbourhood, Central Etobicoke, is where Premier Doug Ford of Ontario came from. It’s middle class suburbs like this across the province that gave him his electoral majorities.
But people around here are starting to wonder whether the Premier has, in fact, forgotten the people who put him where he is as we watch this extremely expensive obsession of the Premier’s with downtown Toronto waterfront mega-projects.
So $2.2 billion of public money is being spent on the Ontario Place luxury spa and the shrunken Science Centre. And here I’m standing at the Wedgewood Park community pool, which as you can see has no water in it and is completely closed.
It will be closed until late June, even though there’s plenty of days like today, which are in the high 20s in June where lots of kids would like to be using this pool and adults too.
And of course, if you’re trying to sign your kids up for swimming lessons at any time, good luck because they’re generally full. Now, of course, the pool is a municipal project, but the city does not have the money to open these things more. And the province has no problem interfering in municipal jurisdiction when it wants to change something.
So why can’t some small portion, some tiny portion of that 2.2 billion go instead to open our neighbourhood pools?
Here’s another example of neglect that I find pretty depressing. So this is the old Etobicoke school board building. It’s this cool architecture they call this brutalist architecture.
This used to be the school board headquarters for Etobicoke, back when Etobicoke was its own city. Then, of course, Etobicoke was amalgamated into Toronto by a conservative government, and we lost our local school board.
And then most recently another conservative government has taken over the Toronto District School Board and this building has just been allowed to go completely to seed.
You can see the stairs have fallen apart so badly that they’ve had to be blocked off so no one can use them because they are a serious hazard, and the landscaping is not being kept up, things are overgrown and you know there’s a big pothole over here as well.
These should be our civic jewels. Good things should be happening here. The government should be taking care of them instead of just taking them over and then letting them fall apart, so they’re eye-sores and do no good to anyone.
This whole district is called Etobicoke Civic Centre and it was a City of Toronto building for a long time. The City of Toronto is now moving its staff out of here, and a lot of people are asking whether anything great might be done with this site once the city moves out. Perhaps top of the list would be a new healthcare facility.
There are over 200 hospital sites across Ontario. We have zero hospitals or hospital sites in Central Etobicoke. There’s 75 community health centres across Ontario. Again, we have zero community health centres in central Etobicoke. And we have a a high population of retired people; we have a lot of people with high health needs, and yet we are simply not getting investments in health infrastructure in Central Etobicoke.
And I think I know why: it’s because the people who represent us even though they are very powerful- Premier Ford living in Central Etobicoke, the Minister of Infrastructure representing Central Etobicoke — simply take this area for granted and don’t think they need to prioritize investments here when they could be spending that money on the waterfront instead.
Alright, one more example for you. So this is the Etobicoke Olympium and it’s terrific. This is a world class swimming facility and a gym and a rec centre. The problem is that this was built in 1976, and it’s the last significant recreation centre that was built in a Etobicoke Centre, 50 years ago.
Just last year there was the possibility of having a recreation centre built in the riding at Eglinton near Royal York but the MPP and the Premier and our Councillor teamed up to get It cancelled.
They said they didn’t like the location, but there’s been no talk whatsoever of having that built in another location (in the riding). And this (Etobicoke Olympium) was built when Etobicoke was much smaller than it is today.
And you see in Mississauga and in other parts of Toronto and the suburbs, beautiful new recreation centres opening up so kids can learn to swim and adults can use the gym and all this stuff.
And we are just not getting that in central Etobicoke. It’s like we’ve been forgotten or the people who are supposed to be speaking for us and fighting for us are just taking us for granted.
So we’re stuck in the past.
Maybe when you get to be as powerful as Doug Ford is right now, nothing smaller than a huge mega-project by the lake — like a 2.2 billion dollar spa or a jet runway or a convention centre on Lake Ontario — maybe nothing smaller than that is big enough to seem important to you.
But for the people who actually live in the communities of Ontario, it’s the little things that make a difference. And until we can get our pools open on hot days and have health care facilities where we need them and, you know, opportunities for our kids to learn to swim, let’s put the priority where it belongs and tell these people who are supposed to be representing us that they need to do better.
@noel.semple7 Toronto Pearson airport is closer than you think! Let’s use the infrastructure we’ve already paid for, instead of wasting money paving over the waterfront and islands.
♬ original sound – Noel Semple
Transcript:
Expanding the Toronto Island airport for big jets is a bad idea for a bunch of reasons. But for me as an Etobicoke guy and a taxpayer, a big one is that it’s a waste of money, given that we’ve got Pearson airport right here with oodles of room to expand, and it’s a lot closer to downtown than a lot of people think.
So I took the 900 Express bus here from the Bloor line. It took me 20 minutes. And driving from Pearson Airport to Union Station downtown can be as quick as 24 minutes depending on traffic. More importantly, it’s only 28 minutes any time of the week on the Union Pearson Express.
The Ford government says we’ve got to expand the island airport to attract tourists and businesspeople to Toronto. But can you find me a single tourist or business person anywhere in the world who’s saying, I’m thinking of coming to Toronto, but you know what, 24 or 28 minutes is just too far from downtown, so I’m just gonna go to Chicago instead.
It doesn’t make sense.
Speaking of the Union Pearson Express, we, the taxpayers of Ontario, spent almost half a billion dollars building this train just 10 years ago to get that 28 minute guaranteed service from Pearson to union.
It’s very expensive to build public transit in Ontario. Once we built it, we should get the most out of it. We should use it, we should expand the capacity of this train. They could just run a few more cars on it, increase the frequency, it would be very cheap, and expand Pearson to meet whatever unmet demand there is for air travel in Toronto, instead of paving over more of the waterfront and destroying a beautiful spot on the Islands, just to replicate something that Pearson’s doing already very close to the city.
Premier Ford and his Minister of Infrastructure, Kinga Surma, represent the two Etobicoke ridings that are right next door to Pearson Airport. And there once was a time when cabinet ministers would kind of “bring home the bacon” a bit, and make sure that needed infrastructure projects in their home ridings were funded.
That’s definitely not happening in Etobicoke because the Premier is obsessed with building things on the downtown waterfront, whether it’s the luxury spa or this convention centre on the lake or the shrunken science centre, or now this idea of paving over the islands to put jet runways.
So if you want value for taxpayer money, and if you want what we’ve already built at such enormous expense to be used intelligently instead of more money being wasted on vanity projects, then demand a better provincial government.