It is a commonly held belief that Ontario is the litigation capital of Canada. With more lawyers than any other province, a greater population and far larger economy, this idea is intuitive and easy to believe.

However, the question remains; are individuals and corporations located in Ontario more likely to litigate than those located elsewhere? With no immediate answer at hand aside from anecdotes and conjecture, I decided to investigate.

In order to analyze how much litigation is taking place in Canada, I looked at the number of Court decisions there are from Canlii for each province from January 1st, 2014 to December 31, 2016. I chose those years to standardize the input as some jurisdictions do not have data from prior to 2014, while others have not entered decisions for 2017 yet. The data is imperfect as it includes some Court decisions for matters such as costs motions and other non-trial decisions, but for the most part, provides an accurate picture on the amount of litigation taking place in Canada. This number includes both civil and criminal court cases.

Province Court decisions GDP Population
Ontario 19,249 763,276,000,000 13,983,000
British Columbia 8,954 249,981,000,000 4,751,600
Alberta 4,349 326,433,000,000 4,252,900
Saskatchewan 2,235 79,415,000,000 1,150,600
Nova Scotia 1,879 40,225,000,000 949,500
Newfoundland 1,106 30,100,000,000 530,100
Manitoba 1,080 65,862,000,000 1,318,100
New Brunswick 819 33,052,000,000 756,800
Yukon 388 2,710,000,000 37,500
Northwest Territories 270 4,828,000,000 44,500
Prince Edward Island 169 6,186,000,000 148,600
Nunavut 114 2,447,000,000 37,100

The numbers are hardly surprising here, the more populous and wealthy a Province is, the more court decisions there are. This is supported by the data indicating that 98.6% of the variation in court decisions per province can be explained by population differences alone.

However, after adjusting for population size, the density of a province still provides some information on how litigious the province is. Adjusted for population size, 78% of the variation in court cases across Canada is explained by a province's population density. The smaller provinces have slightly more court decisions per capita than larger Provinces do.

Province Court decisions
per 10,000 people
Manitoba 8.19
Alberta 10.23
New Brunswick 10.82
Prince Edward Island 11.37
Ontario 13.77
British Columbia 18.84
Saskatchewan 19.42
Nova Scotia 19.79
Newfoundland 20.86
Nunavut 30.73
Northwest Territories 60.67
Yukon 103.47

I then looked to see what other factors might influence the amount of litigation taking place in a province. Aside from population size, both crime and economic activity seem to be good indicators of litigation. The more economic activity there is in a Province, the more money there is to litigate over. Similarly, the higher the crime rate in a province, the more criminal trials there should be.

To try and discern how these variables interacted with each other, I ran a multivariate regression on the number of court decisions per province, using population size, economic data, and crime rates as the variables.

Together, these factors explain 61% of the variation in the number of court decisions per province. Ontario and Nova Scotia have more court decisions than the model predicts, while Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan have far less. This means that Ontario and Nova Scotia are slightly more litigations than their population size, economic activity and crime rates suggest, while Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan has less legal activity.

After investigating the data, it seems as if Ontario has slightly more litigation than the rest of Canada. However, the effect is minor, and the level of litigation remains similar throughout the country.

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