Winning the Judgment Was the Easy Part

The situation

Andre worked as the part-time bookkeeper for a small property maintenance crew based in Hamilton, run by a man named Yanni. Yanni also worked a separate day job as a security guard and ran the crew as a side business, taking on landscaping and snow-removal contracts around the city. Andre handled the books, invoicing, and payroll for about three years, working roughly fifteen hours a week alongside his other clients, and was paid as an employee rather than as a contractor, with tax deducted from every cheque.

When the crew lost two of its larger commercial contracts, Yanni let Andre go with no notice and no severance, telling him the business could not afford to keep him on. Andre's final two months of invoiced work went unpaid, and he received nothing for the termination itself. He tried, over several months, to resolve it directly — texts that went unanswered, one phone call where Yanni promised to "sort it out soon," and then silence. By the time he came to Treadstone Law, he mostly wanted to know whether an amount in this range was even worth pursuing, or whether the cost and effort of a claim would outweigh what he could realistically collect.

What the claim uncovered

The math was straightforward. Andre was owed roughly $14,000 in unpaid invoices for work already completed, plus notice pay calculated under the Employment Standards Act, 2000 for his length of service. Once interest and the unpaid invoices were added together, the claim totalled a little over $50,000. Because Yanni did not respond to the claim within the required time, Andre obtained a default judgment for the full amount — a judgment granted automatically when a defendant fails to file a defence, without the need for a trial.

A judgment, on its own, is only a piece of paper. Collecting on it means finding assets the debtor actually owns and using the court's enforcement tools — garnishment of wages or bank accounts, or a writ of seizure and sale registered against real property — to reach them. When our team searched title to Yanni's home in preparation for registering a writ, we found that ownership had already changed. Four months before the default judgment was granted, and about six weeks after Andre had filed his claim, Yanni had transferred his half-interest in the matrimonial home to his spouse, Sophia, for one dollar.

That timing mattered. A transfer for nominal consideration, made after a claim was already filed and before it could be enforced, is exactly the pattern the law is built to catch. Ontario's Fraudulent Conveyances Act allows a creditor to ask a court to set aside a transfer made with the intent to defeat, hinder, or delay creditors. Intent does not need to be admitted — it can be inferred from circumstances like a transfer for little or no payment, made to a spouse, shortly after a claim arises and while the debtor has no other way to satisfy it.

What we did

1. Registered a certificate against title immediately. Before doing anything else, we registered a certificate of pending litigation against the property to alert any future buyer or lender that the transfer was being challenged. Real property cannot easily be sold or refinanced with a live claim registered against it, which stopped the situation from getting worse while the underlying claim was prepared.
2. Commenced a claim to set aside the transfer. We brought an application asking the court to declare the transfer to Sophia void as against Andre, as Yanni's creditor, under the Fraudulent Conveyances Act. The claim laid out the timeline: the crew losing its contracts, Andre's demand letters, the claim being filed, and the transfer for one dollar six weeks later.
3. Requested financial disclosure from both spouses. To understand what could actually be recovered, we sought disclosure of the mortgage balance, any refinancing since the transfer, and Sophia's own financial position. This is where the picture got worse: about ten weeks after the transfer, Sophia had refinanced the property in her own name, drawing out roughly $19,000 in equity, which had since been spent on debts unrelated to Andre's claim.
4. Negotiated a registered charge rather than pushing for a full unwind. A court could, in principle, order the transfer set aside entirely. In practice, unwinding a transfer that has already been refinanced is slow, expensive, and does not put spent money back into the house. We proposed instead that Sophia consent to a charge registered against the property securing a fixed amount, payable on a schedule, in exchange for Andre discontinuing the application. This avoided a contested hearing with an uncertain outcome and converted the claim into something Andre could actually collect over time.
5. Kept pressure on the timeline throughout. Every step — the title search, the registration, the disclosure request — was pursued within days rather than weeks. Fraudulent conveyance claims lose value the longer they sit, because equity keeps moving. Acting quickly is what made any recovery possible at all.

The outcome

Andre did not recover the full $50,000 he was owed. Sophia agreed to a registered charge against the property securing about $29,000, payable in monthly instalments over three years, in settlement of the fraudulent conveyance claim. The shortfall of roughly $21,000 reflected the equity already drawn out and spent before the claim caught up with it, along with the practical reality that pushing for a complete reversal of the transfer would have meant more months of litigation against two respondents, with no certainty of a better result at the end. A court could still, in theory, have ordered the whole transfer undone — but undoing a transfer does not undo a refinancing, and there was no guarantee a judge would go further than what Sophia had already offered to secure.

It was a hard outcome for Andre to accept after having a judgment in hand for the full amount. But the alternative — doing nothing once the transfer was discovered, or spending a year fighting for full reversal while more equity moved out of reach — would very likely have meant recovering nothing at all, since an unsecured judgment against a debtor with no remaining assets is often worth exactly that: nothing. The registered charge gave him a secured, collectible amount instead of an unenforceable piece of paper, with the property itself standing behind the debt. Payments have been made on schedule since the settlement was registered, and the charge remains in place as security if that changes.

The case is a useful illustration of why enforcement is treated as its own body of skill, separate from winning the underlying claim. A judgment establishes that money is owed. Whether it can actually be collected depends on what the debtor still owns, how quickly a creditor moves once judgment is close, and whether anyone checks title before assuming a house is still there to collect against. Andre's claim was well-founded from the start; what put the recovery at risk was the four-month gap between filing and judgment, during which the one asset worth pursuing quietly changed hands.

What you can learn from this