The Canadian anti-mandate court record — what was filed, what the judges actually said about it, and what it cost the people who signed on.
Between 2020 and 2022 a series of mass claims was filed in Canadian courts challenging COVID-19 public health measures. They were announced publicly, promoted to the people most affected by the measures, and in several instances funded by them.
This section records what happened to those claims. Not what was said about them at launch, and not what has been said about them since by either side — what the courts did with them, in reported judgments anyone can read.
The record is unusually clear. Of the four principal actions documented here, every one has been struck, discontinued, or dismissed on appeal. Two reached appellate courts. One reached the Supreme Court of Canada, which refused to hear it. None has produced a trial, a ruling on the merits of any public health measure, or a dollar of recovery for anyone who joined.
Supreme Court of British Columbia, No. S-217586 · 2022 BCSC 1507 · 2024 BCCA 59
The claim ran to 391 pages. In August 2022 the Supreme Court of British Columbia struck it in its entirety as "bad beyond argument," holding that it was prolix, that it failed to set out the material facts a pleading requires, and that it would be impossible for the defendants to respond to. The court declined to let it stand in any part.
On appeal in February 2024 the Court of Appeal agreed the pleading could not stand, but varied the order to permit an amended claim to be filed. An Amended Notice of Civil Claim was filed in December 2024, and a further application to strike it was heard in October 2025.
Status as at this writing: we have not been able to locate a reported decision on that application, and we are not going to characterise its outcome from the parties' own announcements. If you have the citation, please send it.
Struck in full 2022 — amended claim's fate unreportedOntario Superior Court of Justice, CV-20-00643451-0000 · issued 6 July 2020
A 191-page claim brought by Vaccine Choice Canada and seven individuals against the federal Crown, the Province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, two regional health units and a long list of named officials, seeking declarations that pandemic measures were unconstitutional and injunctions against future ones. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was originally a defendant, with $1 million in general and $10 million in punitive damages sought against it; that portion was later discontinued.
The federal, provincial and municipal defendants booked a motion to strike under Rule 21 on the grounds that the claim disclosed no cause of action and was frivolous, vexatious and an abuse of process. It was scheduled to be heard on 30 January and 1 February 2024.
The motion was never decided. In 2024, before the court ruled, Vaccine Choice Canada filed a Notice of Discontinuance ending the action. In its own public explanation the organisation said it had concluded the justice system was unlikely to produce a just decision in its case. Four years, no ruling on anything.
Discontinued by the plaintiffs, 2024Federal Court, T-1089-22 · 2023 FC 252 · Federal Court of Appeal A-67-23, 2024 FCA 106 · SCC File 41415
A mass claim on behalf of several hundred federally regulated workers and others, struck by the Federal Court in February 2023. The Federal Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal on 7 June 2024.
An application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada was filed in August 2024. On 30 January 2025 the Supreme Court dismissed leave, with costs. Those costs were assessed in August 2025 at $1,083.16 and a certificate of taxation issued. The Supreme Court closed its file on 26 August 2025.
This is the only one of the four to have been taken all the way up, and it is therefore the clearest answer to the suggestion that these claims simply have not yet had their hearing. This one asked three courts. All three declined.
Concluded — SCC leave dismissed with costsOntario Superior Court of Justice, 2024 ONSC 7087 · Court of Appeal for Ontario, 6 May 2026
Brought for 473 current and former Ontario healthcare workers who were suspended or lost their positions after declining COVID-19 vaccination, against the province, four government officials and 54 healthcare employers. The claim alleged Charter breaches, conspiracy, misfeasance in public office, intimidation and intentional infliction of mental anguish.
The Superior Court struck it in December 2024. On 6 May 2026 the Court of Appeal for Ontario dismissed the appeal, Chief Justice Michael Tulloch upholding the finding that the claim was an abuse of process disclosing no reasonable cause of action.
The appellate reasons are the most useful thing in this section for a reader trying to understand why these claims keep failing. The Charter did not apply to 47 of the respondents because they are private entities. Workplace consequences did not engage section 7. Vaccination status is not an enumerated or analogous ground under section 15. Allegations that the pandemic was fabricated and that the measures amounted to "martial law" were unsupported by material facts. And most of the plaintiffs were unionised, which meant their disputes belonged in labour arbitration — while the eight with hospital privileges had to use the process in the Public Hospitals Act first.
Leave to amend was granted in part, for non-unionised employees without hospital privileges to bring focused individual claims against their own employers. That is the shape of a case that might actually work, and it is the opposite of the one that was filed.
Appeal dismissed, May 2026 — costs ordered belowSet the four side by side and the same structure appears each time. A very long pleading, naming a great many defendants, advancing claims against parties the Charter does not reach, and asserting facts about the pandemic itself without pleading any material facts to support them. Courts do not reach the merits of such a claim, because they never get past the document.
The consequences fall on the people who signed. A costs award follows a struck claim. Unionised workers who were directed to arbitration spent years in the wrong forum while limitation periods ran in the right one. And the one route the Court of Appeal did leave open in Dorceus — an individual claim by a non-unionised employee against their own employer — was available from the beginning.
The corporate and organisational structures through which these actions were brought and funded — who was incorporated when, who directed what, and how money was solicited from prospective plaintiffs. In preparation.
In preparationOn the RFK Jr. running file. In August 2021 an open letter circulating on University of Waterloo servers told staff and students that a lawsuit was being prepared against every university and college that had issued a vaccine mandate. Readers were invited to join as plaintiffs, told they would be expected to contribute financially, and — as a condition of joining — instructed not to apply for a medical or religious exemption. No public record of that action being filed has been located. The page also documents the Canadian chapter of Children's Health Defense, federally incorporated in 2021.
The local case — Waterloo RegionThe American version of the same tactic, and where it has got to. Children's Health Defense has sued the American Academy of Pediatrics under the federal racketeering statute, on the theory that recommending the childhood immunisation schedule is organised fraud. The complaint, the Academy's answer, and a vaccine-law professor's element-by-element assessment of whether it states a claim at all.
The litigation tactic, exportedWhat happens after a regulator acts. Two American physicians are offered to a federal court as proof that doctors who dissent are destroyed. The orders against them describe the care of named children — a tetanus case treated with colloidal silver, a febrile infant, ninety children left without a second MMR dose, and ten exemptions written for children the doctor never examined. The mechanism by which discipline is recast as martyrdom and then recycled as evidence.
How discipline becomes evidenceWhat funded litigation looks like on a tax return. Three Form 990 filings read line by line: $10.09 million on legal fees in three years, a fifth of everything the organisation spent, and 93.5 per cent of it reported as charitable programme rather than overhead. Also the lawyer who filed the American racketeering suit, listed as a contractor paid $365,601 the year before he filed it.
Who pays for the litigationPosted 21 October 2026 · build 21-10-A · Sources: the reported judgments cited above; the City of Toronto solicitor's report to Council of 15 March 2023 on CV-20-00643451-0000; the Supreme Court of Canada docket in File 41415; the Federal Court of Appeal docket in A-67-23; and Canadian HR Reporter's coverage of the Court of Appeal's decision in Dorceus, 12 May 2026. Corrections are welcome and will be posted.