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| Tom Macintosh Zheng |
Since November 2025, we have tracked the earliest available hearing date offered by the court’s online booking system every day for nine categories of civil hearings including Associate Judge motions, Express Court, Civil Practice Court, Civil Case Conferences and Small Claims Court motions. We have now logged six months of consecutive observations. The data tells us four things about the booking system that lawyers and litigants currently have no way to see for themselves.
Dates arrive in batches
Evgeniia Gordeeva: STOCKPHOTO.COM
We observed similar batch events on four other days during the six-month period. The court does not publish a schedule for these releases, and the system gives no indication that one is coming.
Sometimes the system goes dark
Five of the nine categories we tracked had stretches where the booking system displayed no available dates at all. Civil Practice Court, as one example, had 78 days over a six-month period where there were no available dates.
Imagine you are seeking an injunction, which requires you to first attend Civil Practice Court. In that case, if you happen to scan the booking page on one of those 78 days and see no dates available, the only option is to keep checking until dates appear again.
The good news
Many lawyers think civil court delays in Toronto are getting worse. The data does not support that view. In November 2025, the average wait across all nine categories we tracked was 171 days. In April 2026, it was 104 days.
Seven of the nine categories improved over the period. Civil Case Conference improved by 148 days. Associate Judge motions improved by similar margins. The court deserves credit for the direction of travel.
That said, this direction is invisible to anyone not watching the booking page daily. The court does not publish wait-time data on an aggregate basis. Lawyers form their views from individual encounters with the page, encounters that, by definition, capture only that day’s snapshot.
Short-notice openings happen, and nobody is told
Between November 2025 and April 2026, a Civil Case Conference could have been booked within seven days on 72 separate days. Useful for anyone who needs the court to establish a timetable or make other procedural orders. We saw the same pattern, in varying intensity, across most of the nine categories we tracked.
These openings appear without warning and disappear just as quickly, visible only to whoever happens to be looking at the page in the moment these openings exist. How would a litigant who needed an earlier date know one had become available? And if they don’t know, what happens to the dates?
The takeaway
The booking system contains real-time information about availability. That information is not being communicated to people who need it. The result is that the earliest civil court date in Toronto goes to whoever has the bandwidth to monitor the court’s website.
A firm that can task an articling student with refreshing the page captures more earlier dates than a self-represented litigant, a legal clinic on volunteer hours or a solo practitioner without the time to monitor a calendar. No one is doing anything wrong by refreshing a public page. But the system, as currently designed, rewards those with attention to spare. That is a quiet structural inequity inside a tool whose entire purpose is to make scheduling more accessible.
The next step
The court’s online booking system is itself a meaningful improvement over what came before. The next step is notification. Because access to justice should not depend on who has the means to refresh the booking page the most.
Tom Macintosh Zheng is a Toronto-based former commercial litigator. He is now building online tools at courtready.ca to help Canadians access and understand our justice system. The full report is available here. Tom is this year’s recipient of the OBA Foundation Award.
The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s firm, its clients, LexisNexis Canada, Law360 Canada or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.
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