A recent ruling of the Ontario Court of Appeal denied certification to a class action law suit against the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLGC). The case, Dennis v Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, marks another attempt at a class action certification against the OLGC. The OCA held that the class was overly inclusive, and lacked the “rational relationship” between the class classified by the plaintiff, and the common issues.
In this case, the Plaintiff was seeking to unite a class of individuals suffering from various psychological, mental, and other addictive behavior, as a single class which had returned to the OLGC sites, and had been admitted despite signing self-exclusion forms.
The court determined that they were individual, with individual issues applying to each person. Therefore they could not be certified as a class which had suffered from systematic wrongs. The OCA stated that even if they found that there were systematic wrong, this would not avoid the need for individualized proceedings.
This emphasizes the case-by-case evaluation.
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