The Phone Call That Killed a Signed Landscaping Contract

The situation

Abirami called Kajan on a Tuesday evening, three days before Kenji's crew was due to start work on Kajan's backyard. She told him that Kenji's business was not properly insured, that he had walked off two other jobs that spring, and that Kajan would be taking on real liability by letting Kenji's crew touch his property. None of it was true, but Kajan had no way of knowing that, and by the time Kenji called to confirm the start date, Kajan had already emailed to cancel.

Kenji drove a school bus for a living and ran a small landscaping operation on evenings and weekends, mostly interlock and retaining wall work for homeowners in Richmond Hill and the surrounding area. It was steady side income, not a full business with a storefront, but he carried proper insurance, had a standard written contract he used for every job, and had never left a project unfinished. Kajan had signed that contract two weeks earlier for a retaining wall and patio project worth just under twenty thousand dollars, with a deposit already paid and materials already ordered.

Kenji later learned, from a mutual acquaintance, that Abirami ran a competing small landscaping operation and had lost a bid to Kenji for the same job weeks earlier. Abirami's call to Kajan had not been a warning from a concerned neighbour. It was an attempt to win the job back by discrediting the person who had already signed it, and it worked almost immediately, before Kenji even knew the call had happened.

When Kajan cancelled, Kenji was left holding materials he had already paid for, a deposit he offered to refund but that did not cover his losses, and a five-figure hole in a season that depended on a handful of jobs like this one to be worthwhile. Landscaping work in the Richmond Hill area was seasonal enough that losing one job in early summer often meant there was no realistic way to backfill the calendar before the weather turned. He tried calling Kajan directly to explain and correct the record, but Kajan, having heard a specific and alarming story from someone claiming inside knowledge, was unwilling to reopen the deal, telling Kenji he would rather find someone else than take on what sounded like an unnecessary risk. Kenji came to us not sure whether there was anything to be done about a contract that had been cancelled before any work was performed, and unsure who, if anyone, he could actually pursue, since the person who had cancelled on him had not, strictly speaking, done anything wrong.

The complication

Kenji did not have a claim against Kajan. Kajan had a right to cancel a contract for services that had not yet started, subject to whatever the contract itself said about deposits and cancellation, and nothing suggested Kajan had acted in bad faith. He had cancelled because he believed something false, not because he had changed his mind for no reason.

That pointed the claim at Abirami instead, under a different legal theory than a breach of contract. Ontario law recognizes a claim for interference with contractual relations, sometimes called tortious interference, where someone knowingly and without lawful justification induces another party to break or abandon a valid contract, causing loss to the party left on the other side of that broken deal. The claim does not run against the person who backed out. It runs against the outsider who caused them to.

Proving it required more than showing that Abirami's statements were false. We needed to show Abirami knew Kenji had a signed contract with Kajan, made statements intended to cause Kajan to cancel it, and that those statements were the actual reason the deal fell apart rather than some coincidental reconsideration on Kajan's part. Kajan's own account mattered enormously here. He was willing to confirm, in writing, that Abirami's call was what changed his mind and that he had been satisfied with Kenji's work and price before that call.

The complication was the amount at stake. Once Kenji's paid-for materials, lost deposit shortfall, and a portion of the profit he would have made were totalled, the claim landed around eighteen thousand dollars, squarely in Small Claims Court territory. That court has a simpler process than the higher courts, but a lower cap on recoverable amounts and less room for the kind of formal discovery that makes proving someone's intent easier in a bigger case. There would be no lengthy examinations under oath and no extensive document exchange to fall back on if the direct evidence turned out to be thin. We would need to build the interference case largely from what Kajan and Kenji could each say directly, supported by whatever documents already existed rather than anything we could generate through the process itself.

There was a further wrinkle. Because the amount at stake sat near the upper end of what Small Claims Court could award, we had to be careful not to overstate the claim in a way that would later look opportunistic if the matter reached a hearing. Judges in that court see a steady stream of disputes between small operators and are generally unimpressed by claims padded with speculative profit projections, so getting the number right from the start mattered as much as getting the liability theory right.

What we did

We started by treating Kajan as a witness rather than an opponent, since his account of the phone call was the backbone of the whole case. We took a detailed written statement from him early, while the conversation was still fresh, capturing exactly what Abirami had said and when he decided to cancel because of it. That statement became the anchor for everything that followed.

Next we pulled together the paper trail on Kenji's side: the signed contract, the deposit receipt, the material orders placed in reliance on the job going ahead, and a record of Kenji's insurance and job history that directly contradicted what Abirami had told Kajan. Laying that out cleanly mattered, because the claim depended on showing the statements were false, not just unwelcome.

We drafted and filed the Small Claims claim against Abirami for interference with contractual relations, setting out the elements clearly: the existing contract, Abirami's knowledge of it, the false statements, and the resulting cancellation and loss. We kept the claim focused on documented, out-of-pocket losses rather than speculative future profit, since an inflated claim would have invited the exact kind of pushback we wanted to avoid.

When Abirami filed a defence without a lawyer, we adjusted our approach. Self-represented defendants often do not appreciate what they have effectively admitted in their own filed documents, and Abirami's defence, while denying liability, did not actually dispute that the phone call had happened or that she had said Kenji lacked insurance. That admission, buried in her own words, gave us a strong opening for settlement talks rather than pushing straight to a hearing.

We reached out directly to Abirami with a settlement proposal that explained, in plain terms, why her own defence supported Kenji's version of events, and what a judgment against her could look like if the matter went to a hearing, including the possibility of a cost award on top of the damages themselves. Because she was unrepresented, we made sure the proposal was clear enough to evaluate without a lawyer's help, rather than relying on legal shorthand she might not follow, setting out the numbers plainly and explaining what settling now would save her compared with a hearing later.

We also stayed alert to a risk that comes with negotiating against someone unrepresented: the temptation to press an advantage too hard. A settlement obtained through pressure a self-represented party did not fully understand can unravel later, or simply leave a bad taste that derails an otherwise reasonable deal. We kept the proposal factual and gave Abirami real time to consider it, including suggesting she could have a lawyer review it before signing if she wanted one.

The outcome

Abirami agreed to settle rather than proceed to a hearing, paying Kenji eleven thousand dollars, covering the bulk of his documented material and deposit losses but only a portion of the profit he estimated he would have made on the job. She did not admit liability as part of the settlement, which is typical in these agreements, but the payment itself reflected a real assessment of her exposure once her own words were on the record.

Kenji did not recover everything he had claimed, and the settlement took several weeks of negotiation to reach rather than resolving quickly. He also never fully repaired the relationship with Kajan, who remained wary after the episode even once he understood what had actually happened. The retaining wall and patio job was not rebooked.

Kenji has since added a clause to his standard contract addressing what happens if a customer cancels based on statements from a third party, giving both sides a clearer process if something similar happens again. He also keeps written records of every client conversation now, a habit that would have made this dispute easier to prove from the outset had it existed before Abirami's call.

What you can learn from this