Over a Car. Over an Ugly (Old) Car. (Dawson v Troup, 2026 ONSC 367 (CanLII))

Tayken

Tayken

Well-known member

Over a Car. Over an Ugly (Old) Car. (Dawson v Troup, 2026 ONSC 367 (CanLII))​


Late-stage motion practice over a depreciating asset is an abuse of process.

Dawson v Troup, 2026 ONSC 367 (CanLII): https://canlii.ca/t/khn1q

This endorsement is not about a vehicle. It is about how family litigation is being misused.

The file was years old.
Parenting issues were already settled.
Disclosure should have been completed long before.
A trial date could have been scheduled.

Instead, the parties came back on a contested motion — debating whether it should be a regular motion or a long motion — for a 2008 car valued by the moving party himself at $7,000, and worth less with each passing month.

The court was explicit: the delay had nothing to do with court backlogs. This was party-driven and counsel-enabled stagnation.
  • The motion was brought almost five years after a Request to Admit.
  • The main case had languished without trial readiness.
  • Judicial time was consumed on an isolated issue detached from final resolution.
  • The legal fees necessarily exceeded the value of the asset.
This is not a proportionality problem. It is a sequencing failure.

Motions exist to stabilize cases early. Once temporary orders are in place, the system expects disclosure to close and the matter to proceed to trial. Late-stage motions asking judges to decide contested facts by affidavit undermine that structure and waste public resources.

The court even attempted remediation — standing counsel down, sending them to breakout rooms, urging disclosure resolution while the timeslot was available.

Nothing was accomplished.

The motion was dismissed. No costs were awarded — not as leniency, but because the failure was systemic rather than unilateral.
“Even if the parties don’t care about wasting their own money, they shouldn’t be allowed to waste taxpayers’ money — or precious court timeslots.”
Dawson v. Troup, 2026 ONSC 367
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That statement is not rhetoric. It is classification.

Justice Pazaratz anchored this conclusion in a line of authority rejecting late-stage, motion-driven litigation in mature family files:

Authorities Cited by the Court​

Endless temporary motions in trial-ready files are unfair, inefficient, and institutionally corrosive.

Gafanha v. Gafanha, 2022 ONSC 1613

Crozier v. Nolin, 2024 ONSC 4343

Sham v. Lee, 2024 ONSC 6598

Persaud v. Jeffrey, 2024 ONSC 6678

Bourque v. Luker, 2025 ONSC 941

Hastings v. Hastings, 2017 ONSC 3555

These cases are not about winning or losing motions. They are about protecting the integrity of the family court process itself.

Over a car.
Over an ugly (old) car.

And the court was done.
 
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