Canadian courts have been awarding large amounts of money in defamation cases when negative reviews cross the line. In Premier Finance Ltd. v Ginther, a reviewer ended up with a $90,000 judgment against them. Houseman v Harrison took it even a step further – two former employees had to pay $240,000 combined for the anonymous posts that they made on Rate MDs. This isn’t some rare exception anymore – cases like this are becoming more common.
The tough part is that there’s a narrow space between consumer speech that’s protected and defamation that lands you in court. Canadian law does protect honest reviews because they help consumers make better decisions. At the same time, businesses get protection too when false statements damage their reputation.
The problem starts when a review moves from describing your personal experience to making factual claims that you can’t back up. If you write “the food tasted terrible to me,” that’s a protected opinion. But if you write “the kitchen has rats,” you’ve just made a direct health allegation that could get you into a lawsuit if it turns out to be false.
Let’s talk about this together!
When Your Opinion Becomes Defamation
Canada treats honest opinions and factual statements as two different categories, and it pays to know which is which before you post your next review. Writing something like “the food tasted terrible” or “the service was way too slow” puts you in opinion territory. Personal takeaways like these usually have some legal protection because you’re just describing your own experience and how it felt to you.
This gets way worse if you make claims that sound like they’re hard facts instead of just opinions. Statements like these can be proven true or false in a court of law – it’s what puts you in defamation territory.
Another tough part is that an opinion can become defamatory when it hints at false facts lurking beneath the surface. Maybe you had a bad experience with a company, and you decided to post online that the business owner is running a scam – this type of statement implies large factual accusations about fraud and dishonest business practices (even if you’re just venting your frustration and warning others). If the facts behind your opinion aren’t actually true, you could be defending against a lawsuit.
Canadian courts will look at the exact words you use in your review, along with the context that surrounds them. A judge is going to review how a standard person would interpret what you wrote – does it come across as your own personal experience, or are you making a factual claim about something that can be checked and verified?
Your exact wording can make or break your review in situations like this. Compare “I felt ignored by the staff” with “the staff ignores the customers.” These might sound similar. But they’re not the same at all. The first one shares what happened during your personal visit. The second one claims that this business routinely treats every customer in this way, which is a much bigger accusation to make.
How Courts Test for Defamation Claims
Courts have a fairly easy test they use when a business claims that a negative review is defamation. The business has to prove three separate elements, and they need all three of them to make their case work. If even one of these elements is missing, the entire claim falls apart.
The best strategy is to figure out if you’re talking about facts or just personal taste. If a guest says that a hotel has bedbugs, that’s an actual health and safety problem that’s going to drive every would-be customer away. Say the décor looks outdated – well, that’s just your opinion about the design.
The third part of the case is called publication, and this one’s pretty easy – all it means is that the statement got shared with at least one other person. Online reviews do this automatically because anyone who can get on the internet can see them. A review doesn’t need to have thousands of eyes on it either – even if only three readers have viewed it, it still counts as being published.
A business will have to prove all three of these elements in court if they want to win a defamation case – it’s actually why most of these cases wind up going nowhere. A negative review could mention the business by name and get seen by thousands of would-be customers online. If you don’t have any real, measurable harm to the business’s reputation, though, the whole case will fall apart.
Build Your Case with the Truth
Documentation can matter quite a bit if you’re ever in a position where you’ll have to defend what you wrote. Leaving a review where you’re complaining about poor service or unsanitary conditions at a restaurant means you’re going to want some evidence to back up your claims. Photos of whatever problems you experienced while you were there can help. It’s worth holding onto your receipts and saving any emails that you exchanged with the business. The exact dates and times when problems occurred should be written down, too.
Situations can get a bit tough if you blend your opinions with statements of fact. Writing something like “I thought the service was terrible” – that’s just your own personal opinion about what happened. But change it to “the server was rude,” and you’ve suddenly crossed into different territory. Now you’re claiming that a particular event actually took place. In a courtroom setting, that distinction is going to matter quite a bit.
Exaggeration will cause big problems for your defense as well. Your wait at the restaurant probably felt like an eternity. But claiming it lasted 2 hours when it was 45 minutes destroys your credibility with everyone who reviews your case. Misremembering facts creates the same problem even when the error is honest. When the documented facts don’t line up with what you wrote in your review, your entire defense can fall apart.
The safest way to manage this is to stick to what you went through yourself and what you can prove if anyone questions it later. You should keep everything limited to what you saw with your own eyes as you were actually there. Write about what happened during your visit – just that one experience. Base your whole review on what you directly experienced instead of making sweeping claims about how the business operates day in and day out.
How the Law Protects Your Opinions
Prove that your review is truthful – that’s one way to defend yourself against defamation claims. Canadian law also recognizes another form of legal protection, and it applies when you’re sharing your opinion instead of stating a hard fact. It’s called fair comment, and it gives you plenty of room to express yourself.
Fair comment is a legal defense that protects your right to express opinions. But a few conditions need to be satisfied for it to apply to your review. Your comment has to talk about what’s considered an opinion – and for most online reviews, that’s fairly easy for you to meet. Restaurants that serve the public qualify, as do service providers who advertise their services to customers. The opinion you express also needs to be based on underlying facts that are true and accurate. An average person reading your review should be able to distinguish between when you’re sharing a personal opinion versus when you’re stating something as a hard fact. Malice also can’t be the motivating factor behind your choice to write the review.
This works in some situations. A restaurant deserves criticism if you’ve actually waited too long or been treated rudely. A plumber who shows up late and leaves your bathroom in a mess is acting unprofessionally. Your personal reaction to what actually happened to you is fair game.
A few situations make this protection harder to claim. When a competitor writes a review about a rival business, courts are going to question their true motives. Former employees get looked at in the same way. What judges care about is whether spite was the driving force behind the review or if the person wanted to warn other consumers about a big problem.
A strong review backs up what you’re saying with facts about what went wrong. Don’t write that the food was disgusting – tell them that your steak came out cold or that there was a hair in your soup. Concrete examples like these make your review quite a bit more legitimate, and they protect you if the business tries to claim that you’re just out to hurt them. Honest specifics about what happened and how it affected you are a world apart from making up facts or stretching the truth just to damage their reputation.
Write Reviews the Right Way
A few easy strategies can help protect you when posting a negative review. The most important one is to write everything from your own personal experience and perspective. Say “I had a bad experience” instead of “This business is a scam” – it matters how your review comes across. In the first case, you’re just describing what happened to you. In the second case, you’re making a sweeping claim about the way the entire company operates.
The best reviews describe what happened during your own experience and cover what went wrong and how they messed up your plans, cost you extra money or whatever else got disrupted because of it. Maybe your food showed up cold, or maybe the service didn’t match up with what they promised. Describe the problems in detail. But they don’t try to guess why they messed up or assume the entire company operates that way based on one bad visit.
Reviews that get written in the heat of anger (when you’re still mad or frustrated) are usually the ones that you regret later. It’s worth giving yourself some time to calm down before actually posting anything. A review right after a bad experience can sound way harsher than you intended once you’ve had a chance to cool off.
Be very careful about calling any business out for crimes like fraud or theft in your review unless you have the documentation to prove it. These are heavy legal accusations, and defamation cases can happen fast. Make sure that you have strong proof in hand (receipts, emails, recordings, something concrete) before making claims like that in a public space. Filing a complaint with the government agency that oversees their industry is your best option if you believe the company broke the law, instead of just putting it all in a review.
Reviews aren’t permanent, and you can always go back to change them later. When a business actually responds to your review and manages to fix the issue that you had, it’s worth updating what you originally wrote to show that. Make sure to mention how they resolved the problem. When a business does contact you about a review that you left, your best bet is to stay calm and be polite in your replies – it can be tempting to double down on your complaints or to argue back if you’re still upset about what happened. Escalation doesn’t usually help anyone, though, and it makes the situation much harder for you when the conversation gets nasty.
Monitor and Manage Your Reputation
Reviews that tell the truth about your experience are legal in Canada, and you can write them without any worry as long as you talk about what actually happened. Canadian law protects this type of speech because reviews are how we all look out for one another. Writing about your experience with a business or product helps others choose where they should spend their money and whom they can trust. Reviews also hold businesses in check and warn everyone else about products that don’t work or a service that falls short.
Most negative reviews are never going to land you in court – that’s especially the case if they’re based on what actually happened to you and don’t cross the line into something more malicious. Canadian courts are pretty skilled at telling the difference between a customer who had a legitimately terrible experience and needs to vent about it versus a person who’s actively working to ruin a business by spreading information they know is false. Those legal tests we covered earlier are designed to protect the two sides of the equation – customers with honest complaints get to share their experiences, and businesses get some protection from outright lies and attacks that go too far.
Honest reviews do something that works for everyone who spends money. Every time a person takes a minute to write about their meal at a restaurant, describe how a contractor handled their project or mention their disappointment with a product, they’re adding information that helps the rest of us tell the difference between businesses worth supporting and ones to stay away from.
For business owners who worry all the time about bad reviews showing up, or anyone who wants more control over what shows up when others search for their name online, the right support team can help. At Reputation.ca, we’ve become a trusted resource in Canada for review management, and we keep an eye on social media, manage public relations and manage crisis situations. We help clients work through cancel culture and build a stronger web presence that holds up better.
Contact us, and we’ll create a custom strategy that fits what you need.
