An Ontario tribunal has reminded auto insurers that arguing a driver hid Uber work is not the same as proving it.
The Licence Appeal Tribunal's ruling in Dondi v. TD General Insurance Company, released April 15, 2026, lands squarely in one of the trickier corners of Canadian auto insurance: what happens when a policyholder drives for Uber and the insurer says it was never told. TD ultimately walked away without paying any benefits, but not because it won the misrepresentation fight it picked. It won because the claimant could not prove his own case.
Altayeb Bashir Dondi was in a car accident on November 23, 2021. He applied for statutory accident benefits, including an income replacement benefit of $400 a week from December 1, 2021 to March 31, 2022, and a series of treatment plans covering chiropractic care, physiotherapy, an orthopedic assessment, a chronic pain program and psychological services. TD denied the benefits and went further, arguing Dondi should not even be allowed to proceed. Its position: he had driven for Uber without telling the insurer, and that undisclosed commercial use amounted to a material misrepresentation under section 31(1)(b) of the Statutory Accident Benefits Schedule.
Adjudicator Rebecca Hines was not persuaded. TD told the Tribunal it does not insure vehicles used for commercial purposes, but, as the adjudicator pointed out, it did not put that policy into evidence. There was no copy of the policy wording, no recording of the binding call, no log notes showing Dondi had been warned about commercial use or told to flag changes in how he used the car. "Submissions are not evidence," Hines wrote, in a line claims departments will want to pin above the desk.
The adjudicator also drew a sharp contrast with an earlier Uber case, TD Insurance Company v. Haribalan, where the insurer had produced a recorded binding call showing the insured had confirmed non-commercial use and had been told to report changes in drivers, uses and mileage. None of that was on the table here.
And there was an inconvenient fact for TD: Dondi had disclosed his Uber work on his OCF-1 accident benefits application. That, the adjudicator found, was hardly the behaviour of someone trying to deceive his insurer. While she agreed Dondi should have reported the change in risk when he started driving for Uber, she noted there was no evidence anyone had actually told him he had to.
Despite clearing the misrepresentation hurdle, Dondi lost on nearly everything else. He failed to show the accident left him substantially unable to do his job, and his Uber income in fact rose in the months after the crash. His medical records were thin for the first year, and the expert report he relied on came months after the IRB period in dispute. The treatment plans, interest, a proposed award for unreasonable delay and TD's request for costs were all denied.
For Canadian auto insurers and claims professionals, the takeaway is simple but important. When a carrier wants to rely on section 31(1)(b) to shut a claim down over undisclosed commercial use, the file has to tell that story, through documented policy wording, recorded binding calls and clear written notices about reporting changes in use. Without that paper trail, as Dondi shows, even a reasonable suspicion of undisclosed Uber driving may not be enough.
