Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• • Whether the appellant was obliged to perfect his family law appeal under Rule 61 and comply with repeated case management directions despite his disagreement with the process.
• • Scope and limits of a single Divisional Court judge’s jurisdiction at case management, including the inability to grant final substantive relief on the merits of the appeal or re-decide trial-level issues.
• • Proper boundaries of a s. 21(5) Courts of Justice Act review motion, which must focus on alleged error in the case management judge’s orders rather than re-litigating the entire underlying family dispute.
• • Use of Rule 2.1 to summarily dismiss proceedings that are frivolous, vexatious or abusive where a self-represented litigant persistently refuses to follow directions and seeks impermissible relief.
• • Interaction between an existing vexatious litigant order under s. 140 Courts of Justice Act and additional Divisional Court restrictions on further proceedings and access to that court.
• • Repeated attempts by the appellant to turn procedural and case-management steps into merits-based determinations of alleged fraud, domestic violence, and abuse of process in the underlying family case.

Facts and procedural history

The dispute arises from long-running family law proceedings between former spouses, Niranjan Rajaghatta (the appellant and moving party) and Hema Niranjan (the respondent). The underlying case was commenced in 2016 in the Superior Court of Justice as a family law action, involving claims governed by the Divorce Act and the Family Law Act, including issues about the parties’ separation, alleged domestic violence, and financial and procedural disputes over disclosure and evidence. In November 2023, a Superior Court judge, Roger J., made a significant order in the family law case. Among other things, that order struck out Mr. Rajaghatta’s pleadings, removed his entitlement to notice of future steps, allowed the case to proceed in his absence including toward an uncontested trial, and restricted his ability to bring further proceedings without leave under s. 140 of the Courts of Justice Act. That November 16, 2023 order became the subject of an appeal to the Divisional Court by Mr. Rajaghatta. From the outset, the appellate proceedings were shaped by case management. Justice Labrosse of the Divisional Court was assigned as case management judge to shepherd the appeal. The core procedural requirement was straightforward: the appellant had to “perfect” his appeal, meaning he needed to prepare and file the appeal record, transcripts and factum, in accordance with Rule 61 of the Rules of Civil Procedure, so that a three-judge Divisional Court panel could hear the appeal on its merits. Through a series of case management endorsements in 2024 and early 2025, Justice Labrosse repeatedly gave detailed directions, extended deadlines and explained the proper scope of the appeal. He clarified that: the appeal was from the order of Roger J.; the record on appeal was generally confined to what was before the motion judge; any fresh evidence had to be brought by motion to the eventual three-judge panel; and a single Divisional Court judge at case management could not grant sweeping final relief on the merits of the appeal or re-open years of family-court history. Despite these explanations, the appellant persistently refused to conform to this structure. Instead of perfecting the appeal, he attempted to use case conferences and correspondence to demand that Justice Labrosse and later Justice Corbett make broad findings that the respondent had no prima facie case, had misled the courts since 2016, had committed various statutory and criminal violations, and that prior orders—including the November 16, 2023 order—were void or obtained by fraud. He repeatedly sought declarations, acknowledgements of evidence, and substantive rulings that went far beyond the jurisdiction of a single Divisional Court judge and beyond what was in issue on an appeal from the Roger order. In response, Justice Labrosse issued staged directions. On January 15, 2025, he ordered the appellant to order and file the transcript of the oral reasons of Roger J., perfect the appeal by a clear date (initially February 28, 2025) and, if he wished to rely on new evidence, to bring a separate motion for fresh evidence to the eventual panel. On March 5, 2025, after the appellant again failed to perfect and continued to press for improper substantive relief, Justice Labrosse warned that this was his “last chance” and that if he did not perfect the appeal by March 21, 2025, the appeal would be dismissed under Rule 61.13(3.1) for failure to comply with a court order. At the March 21, 2025 case conference, the appellant expressly confirmed that he did not accept that he had to perfect the appeal in accordance with Rule 61 and refused an additional extension offered by the judge. He continued to insist that a single Divisional Court judge could and should grant the appeal outright or set aside the November 16, 2023 order and that he was not required to perfect the appeal for a three-judge panel. As a result, Justice Labrosse directed the Registrar to dismiss the appeal under Rule 61.13(3.1) for failure to comply with his directions and awarded the respondent $750 in costs, payable forthwith. The dismissal order subsequently issued in standard registrar’s form, reflecting the failure to perfect within the ordered timeframe.

Initiation of the s. 21(5) review motion

Following dismissal of his appeal, Mr. Rajaghatta sought further relief in the Divisional Court. He attempted to settle a draft order for Justice Labrosse’s March 21, 2025 endorsement containing 17 separate operative terms: sweeping declarations about fraud, domestic violence, lack of standing and abuse of process by the respondent, and wide-ranging substantive remedies in the family case. Justice Labrosse rejected that draft as nonsensical and ordered that only the standard dismissal order issue. The appellant then turned to Justice Corbett, who assumed case management of a proposed motion under s. 21(5) of the Courts of Justice Act. That section allows a panel of the Divisional Court to set aside or vary a decision of a single judge who has “heard and determined a motion.” Here, the intended s. 21(5) motion was to review: the March 5, 2025 case management order directing the appellant to perfect his appeal by March 21, 2025; and the March 21, 2025 direction dismissing the appeal for failure to comply. In April 2025, Justice Corbett gave structured time limits for the appellant to serve a notice of motion for panel review and to commit to dates for filing complete motion materials. He also made clear that: the orders of Justice Labrosse were not stayed; the family law proceedings in Superior Court could continue; any s. 140 vexatious litigant restrictions remained in force; and any jurisdictional issues about whether the appeal should lie to the Divisional Court or to the Court of Appeal could be considered in due course if the appeal were restored. Despite these accommodations, the appellant again used correspondence to press for merits-based outcomes: he asked the court to “admit” and “acknowledge” his evidence, to recognize the respondent as an abuser of process who lacked standing, to declare the family proceeding void ab initio, and to re-open and re-decide the underlying family dispute on the basis of a long exhibit list and narrative allegations dating back to 2015 and 2016. He repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of the case management directions, asked for reasons and “juristic” rationale for scheduling decisions, and disputed the very authority of a single Divisional Court judge to manage a motion destined for a three-judge panel.

Case management by the Divisional Court

Justice Corbett responded by compressing and clarifying the process. He set a firm deadline (initially May 16, 2025, then extended at the appellant’s request to June 30, 2025) for the appellant to file all motion materials for the s. 21(5) review. He explicitly ordered that his case management directions took precedence over the appellant’s reading of the Rules and warned that failure to comply could result in dismissal of the review motion. He also directed the appellant to treat any vexatious-litigant leave requirement as a live issue to be addressed in the motion record. Throughout this period the Divisional Court Registrar, by multiple emails in August, September and October 2025, tried to steer the appellant back to compliance: reminding him that Corbett J. was seized of the matter, that no other judge could be asked to intervene, and that his procedural recourse against a Rule 2.1 notice (discussed below) required written submissions within the page limits set by the rule. On June 30, 2025, the appellant did deliver a motion record and factum for the s. 21(5) motion. After review, Justice Corbett issued detailed written case-management directions on July 9, 2025. He explained that the only proper subject of the s. 21(5) review was whether Justice Labrosse had erred in: ordering the appellant to perfect his appeal by March 21, 2025; and dismissing the appeal for failure to perfect. The Divisional Court could not, at that stage, re-hear the underlying appeal from the November 16, 2023 order, nor could it grant the wide array of declarations and merits-based relief the appellant sought against the respondent. As part of those directions, Justice Corbett struck several heads of relief in the notice of motion as frivolous, vexatious or abusive, including the request to directly set aside the November 16, 2023 Superior Court order and a request that the Divisional Court “acknowledge” and “admit” extensive evidence of alleged misconduct by the respondent. He permitted only the true review relief (setting aside or varying the March 5 and March 21, 2025 orders) and the associated costs request to remain. He further struck the appellant’s factum in its entirety, with leave to amend, because it did not address the jurisdictional and procedural issues raised by the case-management orders but instead repeated the same substantive grievances about the family law merits. To give the appellant yet another chance, he allowed until August 29, 2025 to file a new, focused factum. The appellant reacted by challenging the very power of a single Divisional Court judge to review his motion materials, asserting that only a panel could do so; alleging that Corbett J.’s case-management directions were “ultra vires”; and again pressing for decisions on the alleged “merits” of the respondent’s conduct and evidence, including a series of rhetorical questions about whether the judge could “deny” that he was the victim of crime and that the respondent had misled the court.

Rule 2.1 notice and ungovernable litigation conduct

In light of this pattern, on July 11, 2025, Justice Corbett directed that a notice be issued under Rule 2.1 of the Rules of Civil Procedure. Rule 2.1 empowers the court, in the clearest of cases, to summarily stay or dismiss a proceeding that appears on its face to be frivolous, vexatious or otherwise an abuse of process, usually on written submissions only. The notice advised that the court was considering dismissing the s. 21(5) review motions on that basis and also warned that the appellant’s persistent refusal to follow case management directions was putting his continued access to the Divisional Court at risk. Shortly before that direction was transmitted, the appellant filed yet another notice of motion seeking to review and overturn the July 9, 2025 case-management directions themselves. The court extended the Rule 2.1 process to cover that new motion and began to contemplate additional access-control orders. The Registrar then repeatedly told the appellant that nothing further would be accepted from him except written submissions responding to the Rule 2.1 notice—submissions that were to be limited in length and directed to why the proceeding should not be dismissed as frivolous, vexatious or abusive. Instead of providing the required Rule 2.1 submissions or a new factum for the review motion by the August 29 deadline, the appellant continued to send lengthy emails, attach draft orders seeking dozens of substantive findings about the respondent’s alleged wrongdoing and the underlying family case, and demand case conferences to “acknowledge the merits.” He also asked that the Rule 2.1 notice be withdrawn as unsubstantiated and sought to schedule motions to set it aside, despite clear instructions that Rule 2.1 issues would be determined on the basis of short written submissions, not further motions or hearings.

The Divisional Court’s reasoning and ultimate disposition

In his reasons released October 24, 2025, Justice Corbett, sitting as a single judge of the Divisional Court, concluded that this was one of the “clearest of cases” in which dismissal under Rule 2.1 was justified. He began by situating the matter within the modern Divisional Court’s case-management practice, noting that since the pandemic the court has moved to active judicial management of appeals and applications to achieve timely and efficient hearings and to avoid wasteful interlocutory skirmishing. Case management directions, he explained, function much like orders on motions and can properly be reviewed by a panel under s. 21(5); but in the meantime they must be obeyed. When a party continually refuses to follow those directions, rejects the authority of the case management judge, and uses procedure to reopen matters outside the proper scope of the proceeding, Rule 2.1 becomes an essential tool to protect the process. Turning to the merits of the proposed s. 21(5) review, the court held that the review motion was frivolous in the sense of lacking any legal basis or merit. There was simply no arguable error in Justice Labrosse’s decision to require perfection of the appeal in accordance with Rule 61, nor in his decision to dismiss the appeal under Rule 61.13(3.1) after repeated non-compliance and an express refusal by the appellant to perfect, even when given a final extension. Moreover, there was no legal foundation for the appellant’s contention that a single Divisional Court judge at case management could grant the appeal, set aside the Roger J. order, or make far-reaching factual findings about events going back to 2015 based on original evidence presented for the first time on appeal. Those merits issues belonged either in the trial court or before a properly constituted three-judge appellate panel, and only after the appeal had been perfected. The court also emphasized that the appellant had been given multiple generous opportunities to correct course. Before Justice Labrosse, he was warned on several occasions that failure to perfect would result in dismissal. Before Justice Corbett, his deadlines were extended and his defective factum was struck with leave to re-file, coupled with detailed guidance on what issues could properly be argued. Even after the Rule 2.1 notice, the Registrar repeatedly spelled out the simple requirement: file short written submissions within the page limits explaining why the proceeding should not be dismissed. The appellant did none of these things. Instead, he engaged in what the judge described as “relentless debates” with the court about its directions, ignored clear procedural requirements, refused to confine himself to the legitimate issues in a s. 21(5) review, and persisted in trying to turn every step into a platform for alleging fraud, criminality and systemic abuse in the underlying family case. This conduct led the court to characterize him as “ungovernable” in case management. Given the lack of any tenable legal argument that Justice Labrosse had erred, the appellant’s repeated refusal to follow orders, and the heavy resource burden imposed on the court and the respondent, the Divisional Court dismissed the appellant’s motions to review the Labrosse orders under Rule 2.1 as frivolous, vexatious and an abuse of process.

Restrictions on future access to the Divisional Court and costs

Beyond dismissing the pending review motions, the court also imposed forward-looking restrictions on the appellant’s access to the Divisional Court. Building on the existing s. 140 Courts of Justice Act designation made by Roger J., Justice Corbett ordered that the appellant may not commence or continue any further proceedings in the Divisional Court unless two cumulative conditions are met: he first obtains permission from an administrative judge of the Divisional Court (or that judge’s delegate); and he is represented by a lawyer in the Divisional Court proceeding. Any request for permission must be made by a short letter of no more than five pages, and may only attach a copy of the decision sought to be appealed or reviewed, a draft notice of appeal or notice of application for judicial review, and the existing leave order under s. 140. These new Divisional Court-specific constraints apply in addition to the pre-existing vexatious litigant restrictions in the Superior Court. To bring the matter to a close, Justice Corbett further held that his decision itself is not reviewable by another panel of the Divisional Court; the appellant’s only remaining recourse is a motion for leave to appeal to the Court of Appeal for Ontario. He directed that there would be no further process in the Divisional Court to settle the form of the order and that the court office would issue and enter it in due course. Although the respondent had not been required to prepare responding facta on the review motions or the Rule 2.1 process, her counsel still had to monitor and review the appellant’s extensive correspondence and procedural steps over more than six months. Taking that into account, the court ordered the appellant to pay the respondent $1,500 in costs in respect of the review motions and Rule 2.1 proceedings, inclusive and payable within thirty days. Accordingly, the successful party in the Divisional Court is the respondent, Hema Niranjan, who emerges with the appeal and review motions dismissed, future Divisional Court proceedings by the appellant strictly controlled, and a total of $1,500 in costs ordered in her favour in this decision.