Often Deputy Judges are placed in a very difficult position because they are pressured on one end to release judgments quickly and ideally immediately following the hearing, juxtaposed against the pressure to release decisions with sufficient reasons, failing which their decisions will be set-aside and a new trial ordered: something that any judge wants to avoid because it is embarrassing, and more importantly, it doesn’t serve the people well.
In this recent case, the Divisional Court set-aside a Deputy Judge’s decision mainly because the trial decision lacked sufficient reasons to allow the parties (and the appellate court) to understand why or how the judge came to the result.
The following can be learned from this decision, as it relates to the term “sufficient reasons:”
- The judgments in Small Claims Court do not have to contain a thorough review of every fact or legal principal as would be expected in a Superior Court Decision. To demand this level of verse runs counter to the expedient and summary process of the Small Claims Court, and would only serve “to restrict access to justice by unnecessarily imparting formality and delay into a legal process that is designed to be informal and efficient;”
- The guiding principle is that the judgment must contain two primary features: enough detail to let the reader know what was decided (the “what”), and enough detail to let the reader know why the judge came to that conclusion (the “why“). Failing to meet this minimum will leave the reader (including the appellate court) wondering how the decision was made, and this is tantamount to an error in law requiring a new trial;
- It is not the length of the judgment that counts. Indeed, the Small Claims Court decision under appellate review in this case was rather lengthy – eight single spaced pages. The problem, however, was that only one-half page was devoted to addressing the result (ie: the analysis). The majority of the text was devoted to providing a summary of the evidence tendered at trial;
- Where there are contradictions in the evidence, including where the judge’s decision is based on findings of credibility, the reasons should address the conflict and explain why one version was chosen over the other. Bald assertions and generalizations are not sufficient for this purpose. An appellate court cannot give deference to a conclusion reached by the Deputy Judge if that conclusion is to be drawn from conflicting evidence and there is no clear analysis as to why some evidence was accepted and other evidence was not.
Given the foregoing, the appellate court concluded that the reasons were not sufficient to permit a meaningful review of the decision: as stated by the court, “the error in law arises because “the why” is not evident.”
The biggest takeaway from this decision is that Deputy Judges still have a difficult task. Albeit their decisions may not have to be as fluid and intensive as what might be expected in a Superior Court ruling, if the layers of the onion are peeled back, the expectation is still nonetheless high, in what is considered a high-volume court, because Deputy Judges cannot avoid the need to:
- Spend time enumerating the key factual elements;
- Spend time highlighting the facts that are not contentious;
- Spend time highlighting the facts that are in contention, followed by an explanation for why one set of facts or version of events is to be accepted over another, or an explanation for why an assertion has to be outright rejected, at which point the appellate court is apt to give deference to the trial judge, barring any other palpable error in law; and
- Spend time concluding with an analysis that ties in the accepted factual findings with the law and the legal conclusions drawn therefrom.
I believe the biggest problem is the fact that the Small Claims Court was initially started “as a place where small business could efficiently collect their outstanding debts:” this was in 1792, introduced as the Court of Requests (Statutes of Upper Canada 1792 (32 Geo III) c 6, s 1 (UC)). The factual matrix was modest, the parties could put their cases before the judge in 30 minutes, and the judge could make a quick ruling on the spot, and the parties could move on without getting bogged down with expensive lawyers and long drawn-out proceedings to resolve a simple contractual dispute.
Over time, however, with the ever-expanding monetary jurisdiction, the cases before the Small Claims Court have become quite complex at times. The parties lobby for very creative relief, they come with little to no case law, they often don’t streamline their evidence leading it to be poorly marshalled before the judge, and then the Deputy Judge has to “make sense” of this to turn out a decision at the end of day.
Just because a litigant is asking for $35,000.00 recovery, instead of a $1M recovery, the legal issues are often still the same. In the context of a personal injury claim, for example, the Deputy Judge still has to address duty of care, standard of care, breach of standard of care, credibility, contributory negligence, general damages, loss of income, loss of housekeeping capacity, future care costs, mitigation, offsets, collateral benefit deductions, etc. It is easy to say that the detail in the decision doesn’t need to be as full as a Superior Court trial decision, but in practice, it is difficult to discern what exactly can be left out in a Small Claims Court decision.
Elnasr v. Mostafa, 2022 ONSC 1735
https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onscdc/doc/2022/2022onsc1735/2022onsc1735.html