Ontario auto reforms and their affect on litigation

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We asked Patrick Brown, a partner at McLeish Orlando LLP and former president of the Ontario Trial Lawyers’ Association if the changes in the Ontario auto insurance system will have an impact on the personal injury litigation process.

Pat Brown: Yes, for sure they will. Hopefully the intent was to reduce the amount of litigation. I suspect there will be many consumers with more minor-type injuries that won’t litigate. They simply won’t be able to do it. There’ll be a reduction in the number of people with minor injuries within the system. Partly that’s not a bad thing. It’s much better to have somebody with a soft-tissue minor injury who needs six weeks of physiotherapy to access their therapy, get better and get back into the workforce and function. When that happens, that’s a good thing. It reduces the strain on the system and it certainly allows benefits for people who are more seriously injured to be available. So from that standpoint, reducing the number of minor injuries within the system is good.

This went well beyond that though. They went well beyond just taking minor injuries out of the system; they made some very significant injuries taken out of the system.

If you look at the new Minor Injury Guideline which says that if you’re now injured after September 1, instead of having $100,000 available in medical and rehabilitation benefits, you’re going to have $3,500 available.  That’s fine, ok, $3,500 for what’s considered a minor injury so if you have a soft tissue injury, well, $3,500 could very well take care of that four weeks of physio and get you back going where you want. But when they defined the minor injuries, they went well beyond that. They took into consideration that minor injuries would include partial torn ligaments, partial torn tendons. You could have a partial torn meniscus in your knee and still only have $3,500 available to you in benefits to get better. I think anybody who suffers those types of injuries would tell you that is not going to even be remotely enough to help them.

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