Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Central dispute over beneficial ownership of the property and corporate control of Cach, including who was entitled to manage its Royal Bank account and enforce the lease.
• Admissibility of evidence where the tenant’s principal, self-represented, filed extensive but unsworn “affidavit” materials and later gave sworn cross-examination evidence contradicting the landlord’s version of events.
• Whether the motion judge breached procedural fairness by refusing to consider the unsworn materials, declining any adjournment to cure the defect, and proceeding as though the record were uncontested.
• Characterization of the motion relief as de facto partial summary judgment and whether it was appropriate to make final determinations on key ownership, lease, and authority issues in an “urgent” Commercial Tenancies Act motion.
• Risk that binding factual findings on an incomplete or one-sided record would prejudice the tenants’ counterclaim and lead to inconsistent findings at trial.
• Effect of subsequent events (landlord’s recovery and sale of the property, and restoration of bank control) on mootness, and the continuing live controversy over bank-account authority and related declarations.

Factual background

Canada One Family Network (“Canada One”) operated a not-for-profit Chinese cultural or community centre from a two-storey commercial condominium unit at 400 Esna Park Drive, Unit 21, in Markham, Ontario. The registered owner of the unit was Cach Platform Inc. (“Cach”). The individual at the centre of the dispute on the tenant’s side was Ms. Yan Yan (Yanyan) Zhu, the principal of Canada One; on the landlord’s side it was Mr. Wah Hui Lam, an elderly man in his eighties.
Two competing narratives framed the litigation. Cach, through Mr. Lam, claimed that it was the sole legal and beneficial owner of the property and that Mr. Lam was the sole shareholder, director and officer. Under this account, Canada One was simply a commercial tenant under a five-year lease dated March 26, 2022 at $2,400 per month for the entire premises. Canada One allegedly fell into arrears, breached other obligations (including providing insurance and a key), and ultimately stopped paying rent altogether.
Ms. Zhu and Canada One put forward a very different story in their defence and counterclaim. They alleged that in 2015 Ms. Zhu, Mr. Lam and others agreed to incorporate Cach as a shell company to hold title to Unit 21 in trust for Canada One, which would be the true beneficial owner. On this version, several individuals contributed cash towards the down payment, with Ms. Zhu contributing the largest share and thereby becoming a majority shareholder of Cach. The property was to serve as a community and cultural hub, with part of the space leased out to help cover carrying costs, while title remained in Cach for the benefit of Canada One.
The lease documentation itself became a major fault line. Cach asserted that the operative agreement was the five-year commercial lease of March 26, 2022 at $2,400 per month. Ms. Zhu contended that a Lease-Purchase Agreement, also dated March 26, 2022 for a ten-year term, replaced the five-year lease and embodied the parties’ true business arrangement: ultimately conveying the property’s benefit to Canada One, consistent with the alleged trust arrangement. There was also reference to a third lease, dated April 1, 2022, said to relate only to the ground floor.
By late 2023, the relationship had significantly deteriorated. Cach alleged that Canada One was in substantial arrears under what it maintained was the five-year lease, and that other lease obligations had been breached. After delivering a solicitor’s demand for rent and threatening repossession, Cach changed the locks on January 18, 2024. Ms. Zhu responded by re-entering the premises and changing the locks again. She also notified Royal Bank of Canada (“RBC”) that she was the owner or controlling mind of Cach with sole authority over its business account. RBC, facing directly conflicting corporate authority claims, froze the account, which Mr. Lam said left Cach unable to pay its mortgage and other expenses.
Against that backdrop, Cach moved in the underlying action for urgent relief. It sought, under Part III of the Commercial Tenancies Act and Rule 20 of the Rules of Civil Procedure, a declaration that the lease was terminated as of January 18, 2024, an order for possession and overholding rent, and a declaration that Ms. Zhu had no signing authority over Cach’s RBC account and that Mr. Lam alone controlled it. A timetable was set on an urgent basis, and Ms. Zhu’s then-counsel was removed from the record. She was expressly warned that the motion would proceed and that difficulty retaining new counsel would not justify an adjournment. She was later granted leave to represent Canada One as a non-lawyer.

The motion record and evidentiary conflict

On the motion, Cach filed two sworn affidavits from Mr. Lam, attaching extensive banking and corporate documentation. These materials emphasized that he had signed the RBC Master Client Agreement, mortgage documents, business credit card agreements, and business banking loan agreements, and that bank statements were sent to his home address. Mr. Lam swore that Ms. Zhu had improperly filed corporate returns naming herself as director and authorized signatory, which he later had corrected with Corporations Canada, though RBC insisted on a court order before unfreezing the account.
In response, Ms. Zhu, now self-represented, filed voluminous material styled as a responding record and “affidavit.” Her main document opened with standard affidavit language, set out her version of the corporate history and trust arrangement, and attached over 80 exhibits. However, instead of being sworn or affirmed before a commissioner of oaths, it concluded with her own written “solemn declaration” that she had read and understood the contents, believed them to be true, and understood that false statements could lead to legal liability. This defect rendered the document formally unsworn. She also filed further narrative “supplementary” responding material with hundreds of pages of additional documents.
Importantly, counsel for Cach cross-examined Ms. Zhu on this unsworn “affidavit,” and that cross-examination was taken under oath and transcribed. In it, Ms. Zhu reiterated key aspects of her case: that four people, including her and Mr. Lam, had agreed Cach would hold the property in trust for Canada One; that she was a majority shareholder; that monies she contributed were equity, not loans; that the five-year lease was a draft later superseded by the Lease-Purchase Agreement; and that Mr. Lam fully understood and participated in the drafting of that Lease-Purchase Agreement. The transcript formed part of the motion record on Case Center, though it was not explicitly highlighted to the motion judge by the self-represented defendants.
Cach’s written submissions for the motion continued to rely expressly on Rule 20 (summary judgment) in addition to the Commercial Tenancies Act, asserting there was no genuine issue requiring a trial, that relevant issues were severable, and that the tenant had failed to deliver rent cheques as required under the lease. Its factum referred selectively to parts of Ms. Zhu’s cross-examination that were said to support its theory or show her refusing to answer questions.

The motion judge’s decision

The motion was heard by Hood J. sitting in the Superior Court of Justice. Faced with this uneven and procedurally problematic record, he concluded that the only admissible evidence before him was that of Cach and Mr. Lam. He held that Ms. Zhu had filed no sworn affidavit evidence; that the uploaded documents were not in proper evidentiary form but resembled submissions or arguments; and that her oral submissions during the Zoom hearing were mostly incomprehensible and unsupported by pinpoint references to filed documents.
On that basis, the motion judge treated Mr. Lam’s affidavit evidence as uncontested. He summarized it in detail, including the bank and mortgage documentation showing Mr. Lam as sole contracting party on behalf of Cach and the absence of any documentary proof that Ms. Zhu was a shareholder, officer or director of Cach or had authority over its bank account.
The resulting order (the “Order”) granted sweeping relief. Hood J. declared that the lease was terminated effective January 18, 2024; ordered Canada One to vacate and granted Cach possession and leave to issue a writ of possession; ordered Canada One to pay overholding rent at $2,400 per month from January 1, 2024 to the date Cach obtained possession; and declared that Ms. Zhu had no signing authority or control over Cach’s RBC account, with Mr. Lam holding sole signing authority and control. In practical terms, this resolved the immediate landlord-tenant dispute in Cach’s favour, freed up the bank account for its use, and made strong factual findings about corporate control and ownership that cut against Ms. Zhu’s pleaded trust and ownership claims.
The order did not explicitly reference the test for partial summary judgment, despite reliance on Rule 20 in Cach’s materials. Nor did it articulate the legal basis for granting final declaratory relief on the bank account issue. However, Myers J. of the Superior Court later characterized the order as a grant of partial summary judgment within the broader action and held that it was a final order on the issues it addressed.

Subsequent developments and mootness

After Hood J.’s endorsement, Cach took steps to enforce and act upon the order. It evicted Canada One, recovered possession of the property, and, in reliance on the judicial declaration regarding the RBC account, persuaded the bank to restore Mr. Lam’s sole control.
Ms. Zhu and Canada One, through new counsel, filed a notice of appeal to the Divisional Court. At a case conference, there was initially a dispute whether leave to appeal was required on the basis the order might be interlocutory, but on December 13, 2024, Myers J. ruled that no leave was needed because the order was final as to the validity and termination of the lease and as to corporate authority over Cach and its bank account. He further characterized the decision as partial summary judgment.
While the appeal was being scheduled and perfected, Cach listed the property for sale and completed a sale to a numbered company on June 25, 2025, for roughly $1 million, up from an original 2015 purchase price of about $390,000. The buyer’s status, knowledge of the litigation, and the ultimate disposition of the sale proceeds were not fully developed on the appeal record. Cach then moved to admit fresh evidence of the completed sale and of RBC’s implementation of the bank-account orders.
At the appeal hearing on August 19, 2025, Canada One and Ms. Zhu conceded that the portions of the appeal aimed at regaining possession of the property had become moot following the sale, but maintained that the declarations concerning corporate control and the bank account, and the underlying factual findings, remained live and prejudicial to their ongoing claims.

The appeal to the Divisional Court

The appeal was heard by a three-judge panel of the Divisional Court: Associate Chief Justice McWatt and Justices Sachs and Molloy. They admitted the fresh evidence of the sale and bank events without opposition.
The issues on appeal were framed as follows: whether the appeal was moot (in whole or in part); whether the motion judge breached procedural fairness in rejecting Ms. Zhu’s unsworn materials and proceeding without an adjournment; whether he erred in law by granting what was alleged to be partial summary judgment on a contested factual record; and whether his reasons were adequate to permit appellate review.
The panel split. Justice Sachs, writing for the majority with McWatt A.C.J. concurring, would dismiss the appeal in its entirety. Justice Molloy dissented, finding both serious procedural unfairness and a fundamental misapprehension of the evidentiary record; on her view, the order should be set aside.

Majority reasons: no error warranting intervention

On mootness, the majority accepted that the sale of the property rendered it impossible or inappropriate to grant relief that would restore possession to Canada One. They agreed with the appellants that the declarations concerning the bank account, corporate control, and related factual findings remained live because they continued to affect rights and might bear on damages and other issues at trial. The appeal therefore proceeded on the remaining aspects of the order.
Addressing procedural fairness, Justice Sachs emphasized the deference owed to a trial judge’s discretionary decision whether to grant an adjournment. Here, he noted, the motion had been classified as urgent; a timetable had been set; and Ms. Zhu had been warned almost three months in advance that the hearing date was firm and that inability to retain counsel would not justify a delay. In the majority’s view, self-represented litigants, particularly those granted permission to represent a corporation, bear a responsibility to educate themselves about basic procedural rules, including the requirement that affidavits be sworn or affirmed. Ms. Zhu had ample time to correct that defect and did not seek an adjournment for that purpose.
Justice Sachs also highlighted that the motion judge did not refuse to hear Ms. Zhu entirely. Rather, he permitted her to make submissions, repeatedly invited her to anchor those submissions in specific documents, and attempted to manage her presentation. According to the majority, her failure or refusal to point to properly filed documents and her insistence on inappropriate requests (such as asking the judge to contact witnesses himself) undermined the effectiveness of those efforts. Against that backdrop, the majority saw no breach of procedural fairness in declining to adjourn or in refusing to treat unsworn narrative material as evidence.
Turning to the nature of the order, the majority acknowledged that Myers J. had subsequently labeled it partial summary judgment and that this categorization raised legitimate concerns about delay, cost, and inconsistent findings at trial when partial summary judgment is used. However, Sachs J. accepted Cach’s position that the motion was in substance for urgent injunctive and Commercial Tenancies Act relief, not formally styled as a summary judgment motion. In any event, he reasoned, the dispositive question was whether the motion judge erred in making final determinations on the record as he properly understood it.
The majority focused on the motion judge’s finding that the record before him was uncontested: the only admissible evidence was Mr. Lam’s, while Ms. Zhu had filed nothing in proper evidentiary form. After the appeal hearing, when the panel itself located and reviewed the cross-examination transcript of Ms. Zhu and invited submissions on its significance, the appellants argued that this showed the record was in fact contested and that the motion judge had materially erred in treating it as uncontested.
Justice Sachs rejected this argument. He stressed that appellate review must assess whether a judge erred on the basis of the evidence and arguments actually brought to that judge’s attention. The cross-examination transcript, while technically in the record, had not been highlighted or relied upon by Ms. Zhu in argument. To require motion judges to scour voluminous electronic files looking for potentially helpful passages not identified by a party—especially a party who had been given opportunities to point to relevant documents—would, in the majority’s view, impermissibly shift the judge’s role from neutral arbiter to advocate for a litigant. That would distort the adversarial system and generate uncertainty and inefficiency.
Given that perspective, the majority held it was not a reversible error for the motion judge to proceed as if the record were uncontested when no admissible evidence contrary to Mr. Lam’s affidavits had been properly put before him. The urgency of the situation—rent allegedly unpaid, property control disputed, and the bank account frozen—further justified a decisive response based on the unchallenged admissible evidence. The concern about potential inconsistent findings at trial, while real, did not in the majority’s view prevent the motion judge from making final findings where the appellants had failed to “put their best foot forward” on the motion. A future trial judge could, if necessary, distinguish or depart from those earlier findings on a different and fuller record.
Finally, on adequacy of reasons, Justice Sachs concluded that the motion judge’s reasons, while relatively concise, were adequate. They set out the evidentiary basis, explained why certain materials were disregarded, and clearly articulated the chain of reasoning leading to the relief granted. This allowed meaningful appellate review and did not constitute an independent ground for intervention. The majority therefore dismissed the appeal and awarded Cach its costs of the appeal in the all-inclusive amount of $15,000.

Dissenting reasons: procedural unfairness and misapprehension of evidence

Justice Molloy agreed that the portions of the appeal relating to regaining possession of the property were moot given the completed sale, and that the motion judge’s reasons were sufficient to permit review. However, she sharply disagreed with the majority on procedural fairness and on whether the record justified final relief.
In her view, the proceeding before Hood J. was, in substance, a motion for partial summary judgment. However it had been labeled, it resulted in final determinations on central issues in the action: the validity and termination of the underlying lease rights, the corporate authority and ownership of Cach, and the right to control the RBC bank account. These issues went to the heart of Ms. Zhu’s and Canada One’s trust and beneficial ownership claims. Given the diametrically opposed sworn accounts of the parties, Justice Molloy considered the case entirely unsuitable for partial summary judgment or any other form of final determination on a paper record.
On procedural fairness, she emphasized that Ms. Zhu was an unrepresented layperson who had made substantial efforts to comply with procedural expectations by preparing materials that closely mimicked counsel-drafted affidavit and motion-record formats. The defect—that her affidavit had not been sworn before a commissioner—was, in her analysis, a matter of form rather than substance, particularly because Ms. Zhu had added her own solemn declaration acknowledging the potential legal consequences of false statements. In the circumstances, Justice Molloy said it was open to the motion judge either to accept the materials unsworn, to have Ms. Zhu swear them in open court at the hearing, or at minimum to grant a short adjournment to regularize the form. To proceed as if she had filed nothing at all, without such accommodations or clear explanation, was in her view unfair.
She also took issue with the reliance on service irregularities (documents uploaded to Case Center but allegedly not separately served) as a basis for excluding Ms. Zhu’s exhibits. Since those materials were in fact accessible to opposing counsel on Case Center, and counsel had not shown prejudice or objected on service grounds, Justice Molloy regarded it as unfair to refuse to let Ms. Zhu rely on them or to treat her as unable or unwilling to connect her submissions to documents.
Most significantly, the dissent highlighted the existence of the sworn cross-examination transcript of Ms. Zhu as a critical piece of evidence that directly contradicted Mr. Lam’s affidavit and supported the defendants’ pleaded case. Although she did not fault the motion judge personally for failing to locate or review it, Justice Molloy concluded that the decision itself rested on a fundamental misapprehension: the belief that there was “no admissible evidence” from Ms. Zhu. That premise, she reasoned, was demonstrably wrong because the cross-examination provided sworn evidence on the core factual disputes.
She canvassed several examples from the transcript where Ms. Zhu under oath described the intended trust arrangement, the alleged shareholder structure of Cach, the origins and purpose of the Lease-Purchase Agreement, and her understanding of Mr. Lam’s role and consent. This sworn testimony squarely contested Mr. Lam’s narrative of sole ownership, loan repayment, and alleged deception in the lease documentation. On Justice Molloy’s analysis, this meant that the record was not uncontested and that the legal thresholds for granting summary judgment or final declaratory relief were not met: there were credibility contests on central issues that could only be resolved at trial.
In addition to these evidentiary concerns, the dissent stressed the disproportionate impact of the orders made. By terminating the lease, authorizing possession, and confirming Mr. Lam’s sole control of the bank account, the motion judge effectively enabled Cach to sell the property and lock in a position fundamentally inconsistent with Ms. Zhu’s and Canada One’s beneficial ownership claim, without ever resolving that claim on the merits. Interim or tailored injunctions—such as provisions for payment of rent, limited access to the bank account for expenses, or preservation of sale proceeds—could have protected Cach’s immediate interests without effectively disposing of key issues.
In the result, Justice Molloy would have allowed the appeal, set aside the order, and remitted the underlying disputes for determination on a proper evidentiary footing, possibly with interim protective orders and an expedited trial.

Outcome and significance

The Divisional Court, by a 2-1 majority, dismissed the appeal in Canada One Family Network v. Cach Platform Inc., 2025 ONSC 6713. The majority upheld the motion judge’s order terminating the lease, granting possession (now moot due to sale), fixing overholding rent at $2,400 per month up to the landlord’s recovery of possession, and declaring that Ms. Zhu had no authority over Cach’s RBC account while Mr. Lam held sole signing authority and control. The court awarded Cach its costs of the appeal fixed at $15,000 on an all-inclusive basis. The total monetary consequences of the underlying order—particularly the precise rent and other sums payable under the lease and overholding provisions—could not be definitively quantified from the appeal reasons alone because the record did not specify the exact possession date or the final accounting of arrears, and because any broader damages or trust-related monetary relief remain to be determined, if at all, in future proceedings.