What does joint and several liability mean if more than one person caused my injury in Ontario?

Under the Negligence Act, when two or more parties are each found at fault for causing your injury, they are jointly and severally liable to you, which means you are generally entitled to recover the full amount of the judgment from any one of them, or any combination of them, regardless of that particular defendant's individual share of the overall fault. In practice, this means you do not have to chase down each defendant separately for their exact percentage; you can pursue payment in full from whichever defendant is actually able to pay.

This rule exists mainly to protect injured plaintiffs, especially where one at-fault party turns out to be uninsured, judgment-proof, or otherwise unable to pay their share, so the risk of an unrecoverable defendant falls on the other defendants rather than on you. Once you have been paid, it becomes the defendants' problem to sort out how much each of them should ultimately bear between themselves, which is addressed separately through contribution and indemnity claims. Joint and several liability applies to the plaintiff's right to collect; it does not change how fault is apportioned between the defendants for that internal reallocation.