CANADA Trends and Developments Contributed by: Elizabeth Bowker, Shadi Katirai, Christian Breukelman and Grace Murdoch, Stieber Berlach LLP
matters. She has experience representing institutional clients in large-scale class proceedings and a broad range of complex litigation matters. In addition to her practice, Grace is actively involved in legal education and has coached competitive moot teams and volunteered with the Ontario Bar Association’s annual Tort Law Moot. She is a member of the Toronto Lawyers Association, the Ontario Bar Association, and the Canadian Bar Association.
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Given their scope and potential for significant awards of damages, developments in class actions have important implications for insurers. This section examines trends and developments in class actions, specifically: standing requirements for representative plaintiffs in multi-defendant proceedings; significant findings in privacy class actions; and the rising costs of certification. All of these developments affect the litigation strategy insurers and their defence counsel should consider from the outset of the file. Representative Plaintiffs, Multi-Defendant Proceedings and the Future of Ragoonanan The pending decision from the Court of Appeal for Ontario in G . G . v Ontario 2025 ONSC 3011 may be one of the most significant class action developments in Ontario this year. A five-judge panel of the Court of Appeal was asked to consider a fundamental pro- cedural question: when can a representative plaintiff pursue claims against a defendant against whom they have no personal cause of action?
The underlying litigation in G . G . arises from the pri- vacy breaches by children’s aid societies on pregnant persons as a result of the societies’ practice of send- ing birth alerts to hospitals prior to the birth of the child. However, the broader significance of one of the issues on appeal extends far beyond the child welfare context. In that case, two plaintiffs, each of whom had interacted with only one children’s aid society, sought to certify a class action against 49 different societies, alleging improper disclosure of their personal informa- tion. Children’s aid societies in Ontario are independ- ent corporations with separate governance structures, operational policies and legal identities. For more than two decades, Ontario courts have applied the principle from Ragoonanan v Imperial Tobacco , 2000 CanLII 22719, requiring that, for each defendant named in a class proceeding, there must be a representative plaintiff with a claim against that defendant. The rule reflects a traditional feature of civil litigation: litigation proceeds because a plaintiff asserts a claim against a particular defendant, not
58 I NSURANCE L I T IGATI O N 2026
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