What happened: An Ontario court refused to let a driver appeal a ruling that blocked her claims against her insurer, Aviva.
Who's involved: Aviva Insurance Company of Canada, its policyholder, and the other driver in a rear-end collision.
What's at stake: Damages she sought from Aviva, including punitive damages, plus $2,500 she now owes in costs.
Why it matters: Once her crash lawsuit was formally ended, the court saw no legal basis to add new claims.
Where it stands: Appeal bid denied September 25, 2026; she has 30 days to pay Aviva $2,500.
An Ontario driver wanted punitive damages from her insurer, Aviva, for what she said was its refusal to defend her in a crash lawsuit.
Aviva had, in fact, hired lawyers who defended her - right up to a settlement in which Aviva paid nothing on her behalf.
Now she has lost her bid to appeal. On September 25, 2026, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice refused to let her take the fight to the Court of Appeal, largely because of an order from an unrelated case.
In January 2025, another court had declared her a vexatious litigant. In plain terms, she could not start a new proceeding in any court, or keep an old one going, without a judge's permission first. She did not ask for it.
It started with a rear-end crash. According to the decision, she rear-ended the other driver, who sued her in June 2020.
In January 2021, she served her own defence, without a lawyer. Aviva didn't know.
Aviva, meanwhile, had hired a law firm, which served a defence of its own that May. Through what the court called "inadvertence," the firm never filed it with the court. So it never found out its client had already served one.
The firm told her it would handle her defence. The case went through pretrial questioning and settled at mediation, with Aviva paying nothing on her behalf. On June 17, 2025, the lawsuit was formally ended, with the firm signing off for her.
The very next day, she served Aviva with a draft claim that tried to pull her own insurer into the case.
According to the decision, she wanted pain and suffering, aggravated and punitive damages from Aviva, both for refusing to defend her and because her premium had gone up after the crash. She also wanted to sue the other driver back for $45,000 in general damages and $10,000 in special damages, saying that driver had brought "an unsubstantiated and prolonged proceeding which caused financial and reputational harm."
Her motion to get those claims going never got a hearing. Twice, the court in Brampton pulled it from the list. Both times, she hadn't filed a confirmation form.
Aviva then went to court itself. In December 2025, a judge ruled she could not bring either claim in a lawsuit that had already ended, and ordered her to pay Aviva $2,500 in costs.
Neither Aviva nor the other driver knew about the vexatious litigant order when that motion was argued, the decision says. It mattered a great deal once she tried to appeal.
To get permission, she had to show two things: that the appeal wasn't a misuse of the court's process, and that it had a reasonable basis. She managed neither.
The court found the December motion had gone ahead in breach of the vexatious litigant rules, because she had brought her own motions without permission. She never said under oath that she didn't know about the order, or that she hadn't received it.
Her five arguments against the December ruling didn't land either. She said the hearing was unfair, but she had filed written arguments and spoken at it, and the court said getting "restricted speaking time" and being interrupted was not unfair treatment. She also objected to an unsigned police report, which the court said had nothing to do with the question on the table: whether new claims could be added to a lawsuit that had ended.
The court's bottom line: letting her "continue her legal quest would not serve the interests of justice."
Aviva asked for $4,500 in costs this time. The court couldn't find a bill of costs, noted the paper-only application wasn't complex, and set the figure at $2,500 - matching the first award. She has 30 days to pay.
Once defence counsel consented to formally ending the lawsuit, an insured's late claims had nowhere to go - and a vexatious litigant order made sure the appeal didn't either.
The ruling decided only whether she could appeal. No court has ruled on the substance of her complaints about how Aviva handled her defence or her premium.
