Canada: New Torts and Legislative Reforms Impact Personal Injury Law

Here’s what the new tort rulings and provincial changes mean for Canada’s personal injury law As the cause of action in personal injury law has always been the starting point, there are now more of them in 2026. A Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) ruling this May recognised a new tort that did not exist in Canadian law before. At the same time, legislative reforms are quietly reducing what injured plaintiffs can actually recover. For personal injury lawyers and their clients, the question is no longer just whether a case exists, but rather, it is which tools to reach out for in that specific case. The causation test has not changed since the Supreme Court of Canada settled it in Clements v. Clements , 2012 SCC 32 . While the default is still the “but for” test, the “material contribution to risk of injury” is still there as the substitute. The “but for” test states that a plaintiff must show, on a balance of probabilities, that “but for” the defendant’s negligence, the injury would not have occurred. Under this test, the court does not require scientific proof, since a common-sense inference from the evidence is enough. What that means in practice matters. The trial judge in Clements dismissed the claim partly because accident reconstruction modelling could not pinpoint the exact cause. However, the SCC said that was an error, stating that scientific precision is not a precondition. As such, courts are expected to take a practical, grounded approach to the evidence in front of them. There is a second, narrower causation pathway that comes up occasionally, which is called the material contribution to risk. It is not a causation test at all, and the SCC described it as a policy-driven rule that lets plaintiffs recover where the “but for” causation cannot be proven. The “material contribution to risk of injury” only applies when: One tortfeasor, one file, scientific uncertainty — none of that qualifies. As practitioners sometimes try to invoke this pathway in single-defendant cases, yet courts consistently turn it away. As held in Clements , these two approaches are “two different beasts,” and treating them as interchangeable is an error that can unravel a case on appeal. Where multiple defendants are involved and each can credibly deflect individual, material contribution to risk is the appropriate framework. Think of Cook v. Lewis , [1951] SCR 830 , where two hunters fired simultaneously and no one could say whose shot struck the plaintiff. Here, the plaintiff still needs to establish global negligence. Notably, it is a narrow exception, and Canadian courts have never extended it to a single-tortfeasor case. Learn more from one of the best personal injury law firms in the country on why trial preparation and compassion define a top injury practice: Check out our article on “ Personal injuries proceedings act: Limits, notices, and traps ” to learn about the factors that lawyers and litigants should not miss in these cases. For most of Canadian legal history, a victim of sustained domestic abuse had to squeeze their experience into existing torts, such as: Under the law, each of these causes of action required proving a specific incident. However, none of them captured what actually happens in a coercive relationship: the slow erosion of a person’s autonomy over months or years. That gap closed in May 2026 with Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia , 2026 SCC 16 , where the SCC recognised a new tort of intimate partner violence (IPV). Grounded in coercive control, IPV is now a unique tort under Canadian personal injury law. The SCC in Ahluwalia held that existing torts were structurally incapable of addressing the distinct harm caused by coercion within an intimate relationship, specifically, the loss of dignity, autonomy and equality. To establish the new tort of IPV, a plaintiff must prove three things: Once those three