Plaintiff says lack of preparedness led to injuries, deaths
The Ontario Superior Court has preferred the more flexibly defined period proposed by the plaintiff for a claim in a class proceeding concerning the Huron Lodge long-term care home’s infection prevention and control (IPAC) processes.
In this class action and five others against individual long-term care homes, the parties and their counsel agreed on a certification order’s terms, except for the third paragraph relating to the present action. The paragraph stated that the claim concerned IPAC at Huron Lodge.
The plaintiff’s proposed version included a “period leading up to and during the Class Period,” while the defendants’ suggested version specified a “3-week period leading up to and during the Class Period.”
In Adamo v. Huron Lodge Long Term Care Home, 2026 ONSC 3345, the parties and their counsel agreed that:
The plaintiff’s counsel did not want to define the period leading up to the lodge’s first infections. They said their claim of systemic failure against Huron Lodge and other long-term care homes centred on the lodge’s preparation for the pandemic in the months and perhaps even years preceding the first COVID-19 cases.
The plaintiff’s counsel alleged that the lack of preparedness led to the injuries and deaths that eventually occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the defendants’ counsel, three weeks before the first outbreak would be an appropriate cut-off date for discovery examination questions because three weeks roughly corresponded with the COVID-19 incubation period.
The defendants’ counsel asserted that any questions tackling a time before the three-week mark would be causally irrelevant to any injury of a Huron Lodge resident.
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice preferred the plaintiff’s flexibly defined period, given the following duality: “IPAC processes that hark back many months before the first outbreak in a given long term care home and whose effects continue to be felt during the outbreak vs. IPAC matters that were a matter of the long term care home’s history but that changed by the time the first outbreak came to the home and are not causally connected to the outbreak.”
The court found that the interpretation and application of the period open for discovery questions should be in the context of “the COVID outbreak that actually came to be.” The court added that discoveries should assess the relevance of any IPAC matter preceding the first outbreak on a question-by-question basis.
“Those questions are to be framed with a view to fully exploring the IPAC issues at the Defendant home while at the same time avoiding an exploration of matters lacking causal connection to the eventual outbreak at the home,” wrote Justice Edward M. Morgan for the court.
The court acknowledged that both the plaintiff’s counsel and the defendants’ counsel were partly correct. The court accepted that a long-term care home’s preparedness for infectious disease control was indeed an issue in the systemic failure claim and related claims.
However, the court ruled that such preparedness at a time predating the first outbreak or the incubation period would be an issue in the claim only if the state of preparedness actually affected future outbreaks.
The court emphasized that this was an action for compensation for actual harm to the class members, not a regulatory inquiry into the long-term care home’s overall management.
