Ontario Is About to Make Mediation Mandatory: Here's What That Means

For decades, mandatory mediation in Ontario's civil courts applied to three jurisdictions only: Toronto, Ottawa, and Windsor. If you lived anywhere else in the province and found yourself in a civil dispute, mediation was something you could choose, but no one required it. That is about to change, fundamentally and province-wide.

Ontario's Civil Rules Review, launched in 2024 as the most significant reform of civil procedure in a generation, released its Final Policy Report on December 15, 2025. Among its most consequential recommendations: mandatory mediation will be expanded to all civil cases across Ontario. Every jurisdiction. Every region. Including Northern Ontario.

For anyone involved in or adjacent to civil disputes in this province, this is not a procedural footnote. It is a sea change.

Where Things Stand Now

Under Rule 24.1 of the current Rules of Civil Procedure, certain civil lawsuits in Toronto, Ottawa, and Windsor must go to mediation before proceeding to trial. The program has been operating successfully for nearly thirty years, and the evidence in its favour has been consistent: cases settle earlier, costs are lower, and court resources are used more proportionately.

The rest of Ontario has operated without that requirement. Parties in civil disputes outside those three cities could litigate from start to finish without ever sitting down with a mediator unless they chose to or their lawyers agreed to it.

The Final Policy Report ends that distinction. Under the proposed new framework, mediation will be mandatory for civil cases on both the Summary Track and the Trial Track across Ontario. Pre-trial conferences, which judges currently use partly as informal settlement discussions, will be refocused exclusively on trial management. The settlement function those conferences served will shift to mediation, where it belongs.

The new rules are expected to come into force in 2026. Implementation timelines are still being finalized, but the direction is unambiguous. Ontario is moving toward a civil justice system where mediation is built into the process.

Why This Matters: And Why It Is Overdue

Ontario's civil court system is, by any honest measure, under severe strain. Trials in many jurisdictions are now being booked into late 2026 and beyond, with no clear timeline for recovery. The cost of civil litigation has long been disproportionate to the outcomes it produces. Mandatory mediation is not a workaround for that problem. It is a structural response to it. When mediation is embedded into the process early, disputes narrow. Parties understand each other's positions more clearly. Many cases settle before they consume the court time and legal costs that a full trial demands. The ones that do not settle go to trial with sharper issues and better-prepared parties.

The June 2025 amendments to the Rules of Civil Procedure, including the new Rule 49.14 requiring mandatory disclosure of partial settlements, reflect the same underlying logic. Ontario is systematically reducing the space for procedural gamesmanship and pushing civil disputes toward earlier, more transparent, more proportionate resolution. Province-wide mandatory mediation is the most significant expression of that shift.

What This Means for Parties in Northern Ontario

For people in Sault Ste. Marie and across the Algoma region, this expansion is particularly significant. Access to mediation has historically required either travelling to one of the three mandatory mediation centres (before the emergence of online ADR) or retaining a mediator independently without any procedural framework requiring the other side to participate.

That changes with province-wide implementation. Civil disputes in Northern Ontario will move through a system that treats mediation as a required step, not an optional one. Parties who have never considered mediation as a first resort will encounter it as a matter of course.

That creates both an obligation and an opportunity, to resolve disputes faster, closer to home, and with greater control over the outcome than a courtroom can offer.

The Mediator's Role in What Comes Next

What the Civil Rules Review has recognized and what the mandatory mediation expansion reflects is something those of us in dispute resolution have long understood: the courtroom is not always the right place to resolve a dispute, and the adversarial process is not always the right tool. Mediation is not a lesser version of justice. It is a different and often more appropriate form of it.

As Ontario's civil justice system restructures itself around that recognition, the availability of skilled, accessible mediators across the province matters more than it ever has. In Northern Ontario, that availability is only beginning to take shape.