A Vague Counterclaim Meets a Motion for Particulars in Scarborough

The situation

Eleni had been running her commercial cleaning company out of Scarborough for six years, mostly on the strength of word of mouth and a handful of standing contracts with small office and retail landlords. Her husband, Kostas, worked as a hotel front-desk supervisor, and between the two incomes the household budget worked, but only if clients paid what they owed. One of those clients was Raymond, who managed a small group of leased commercial units and had hired Eleni's crew to handle nightly cleaning across three of them.

The arrangement ran smoothly for the better part of a year. Then the payments slowed, then stopped. By the time Eleni called our office, Raymond owed roughly $22,000 across several months of invoices, and every email she sent asking for payment went unanswered or came back with a vague complaint about the quality of the work. She had the signed service agreement, the invoices, and time-stamped photos her crew took at the end of most shifts. What she did not have was a plan for what to do next.

The unpaid invoices did not pause the rest of Eleni's business. She still had to pay her cleaning crew every two weeks whether or not Raymond's account was current, and by month four the gap between what she owed her staff and what Raymond owed her had grown wide enough that she was covering the shortfall out of the household's own savings. She tried the informal routes first: phone calls that went to voicemail, a certified letter that came back unsigned, and eventually a visit to one of the leased units where a property manager told her Raymond wasn't on site and hadn't been for weeks. None of it moved the account. By the time she called our office, Eleni wasn't looking for a legal education. She wanted to know whether $22,000 was worth fighting for through a court process she had never used, or whether she should write it off and move on.

The problem

We filed a claim in Small Claims Court, Ontario's court for civil disputes up to a set monetary limit, seeking the outstanding $22,000. Raymond's response arrived a few weeks later, and it was almost unusable. His defence denied every paragraph of the claim without saying why, a pattern sometimes called a bare or boilerplate denial. Attached to it was a counterclaim, a claim the defendant brings back against the plaintiff in the same case, seeking roughly $13,000 for what he described only as 'damage to flooring caused by cleaning chemicals.' There was no date, no unit number, no product named, no invoice or estimate for the repair, and no explanation of which cleaning visit was supposed to have caused it.

Pleadings in Ontario are supposed to set out the material facts a party relies on, not just conclusions. A defence and counterclaim this thin put Eleni in an impossible spot: she could not investigate a claim she could not pin down, and she could not simply ignore it, because an unanswered counterclaim can still result in a judgment against her if she does not respond properly. Left alone, the case would likely have dragged into a trial where both sides argued past each other, with Eleni spending more in time and stress than the dispute was worth to prove a negative.

There was also a strategic read behind the thin pleading that we flagged for Eleni early on. A bare denial paired with a vague counterclaim can be a genuine attempt to raise a real dispute, but it can just as easily be a stalling tactic — a way to manufacture enough uncertainty to make a plaintiff hesitate, delay, or accept a discount rather than push forward. The two look identical on the page, which is exactly the problem. Ontario's Small Claims Court is built to move informally and quickly, and a judge presiding over a one-day trial with no particulars in front of them might have let Raymond testify to whatever version of the flooring story suited him in the moment, with no paper trail Eleni could cross-examine against. That risk mattered as much as the missing $22,000: even if Eleni ultimately won at trial, arriving there without knowing what case she had to meet would have made the outcome far less predictable than it needed to be.

What we did

1. Reviewed the pleadings for missing facts. We compared Raymond's counterclaim against the basic elements it needed to plead — what happened, when, where, and what it cost to fix — and confirmed none of them were there. This mattered beyond simple frustration with a badly drafted document: without those facts pinned down, Eleni had no way to investigate whether the allegation had any substance, and no way to know which of her crew's visits, if any, she should even be asking questions about.
2. Filed a motion for particulars. This is a request, which can be brought before a judge if the other side won't cooperate voluntarily, asking the court to order the other party to specify the facts behind a vague pleading. We asked the court to order Raymond to identify the date and location of the alleged damage, the product he claimed caused it, and the cost of repair, before the case went any further.
3. Looked into Raymond's ability to pay a costs award. If a party loses a motion or a trial, the court can order them to pay the other side's costs, a portion of their legal expenses. Through the litigation file and some background checking, we learned Raymond had recently relocated outside Ontario and did not appear to hold property or a business registration in the province tied to his own name.
4. Brought a motion for security for costs. This asks the court to order a party — usually one based outside the jurisdiction or otherwise unlikely to be able to pay if they lose — to post money with the court up front, as security that any costs award against them can actually be collected. We argued that if Raymond's counterclaim failed, Eleni would have no practical way to recover her costs from someone with no known assets in Ontario.
5. Used both motions as leverage, not just procedure. Facing an order to spell out a counterclaim he likely could not support with evidence, and the prospect of having to put money into court before he could keep pursuing it, Raymond had real incentive to talk settlement rather than litigate further. Neither motion was designed to end the case outright — Small Claims Court motions rarely do — but together they changed the cost and risk sitting on Raymond's side of the ledger enough to make a negotiated exit look better than pressing on.

The outcome

The court granted the motion for particulars and ordered Raymond to file a properly detailed counterclaim within a set deadline or have it struck. Around the same time, the security for costs motion was scheduled for a hearing. Rather than face both, Raymond's side reached out to open settlement discussions about six weeks before the particulars deadline arrived.

The result was a compromise, not a clean win. Raymond agreed to pay Eleni roughly $16,000 of the $22,000 owed — a discount of about $6,000 off the full invoiced amount — in exchange for Eleni withdrawing the balance of her claim and both sides dropping the counterclaim entirely, with no admission of fault on either side. The whole process, from filing the original claim to signing the settlement, took just under a year.

Eleni did not recover everything she was owed, and she gave up the chance to prove her case at trial. But she avoided the cost and uncertainty of a full hearing over a dispute where the other side's own pleading could not withstand scrutiny, and she collected real money within a predictable timeframe instead of chasing a judgment that might have taken longer to enforce than to win.

The settlement was put in writing as signed minutes of settlement before any money changed hands, with a fixed payment schedule rather than an open-ended promise. Raymond paid the $16,000 in two installments over six weeks, both on time, which spared Eleni the added step of having to enforce a judgment against someone who had already shown he was slow to respond to anything short of a court deadline. Looking back, Eleni was clear that the motions did more than move the file along procedurally — they changed how Raymond's side treated the dispute entirely. For most of the year, her calls and letters had been met with silence or vague complaints. Once a judge was set to weigh in on both the counterclaim's substance and Raymond's ability to cover a costs award, the conversation shifted from stonewalling to negotiating within weeks.

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