Court File No. CV-20-00645492-0000
Equibit Group Ltd. v. Attorney General of Canada et al.
Related: Statement of Claim Against CSIS · Five Things the OIC Final Report Established · The ATIP and OIC Experience
On 1 October 2021, more than a year after Equibit Group Ltd. served its Statement of Claim, the Attorney General of Canada delivered a Statement of Defence in the CSIS action. Under Rule 18.01, with a Notice of Intent to Defend filed 13 October 2020, the ordinary deadline was 30 days from service. The OIC final report later found that CSIS had improperly withheld information from responsive records, agreed that other withheld information was obtained in confidence from a foreign state, and accepted CSIS’s representation that disclosure could harm ongoing investigations. Equibit Group’s position is that those findings stand in tension with that defence.
The Defence Arrived More Than a Year Late
Under Rule 18.01 of Ontario’s Rules of Civil Procedure, a defendant in Ontario must normally deliver a Statement of Defence within 20 days after service of the Statement of Claim.
If a Notice of Intent to Defend is filed (as the Attorney General did on October 13, 2020), the deadline extends to 30 days from service of the Claim.
Instead, the Attorney General took over a year to respond — a delay that is extraordinary even by government standards in complex litigation.
Read the Statement of Defence here:
What the Defence Said — and What It Did Not
For any Canadian who still wants to believe in procedural fairness and the rule of law, this timeline is deeply troubling.
When an ordinary citizen or small company is sued, missing procedural deadlines can result in default judgment and severe consequences. Yet here, the Government of Canada — the very institution charged with upholding the law — took more than a year to file its defence in a case alleging serious misconduct by its own intelligence agency.
This is not mere bureaucratic delay. In the context of allegations involving surveillance, sabotage, and abuse of power, such extended inaction raises serious questions about accountability and whether the system is structured to protect powerful institutions rather than deliver timely justice.
Place in the Equibit Lawsuit
The Statement of Defence is the Crown’s answer in Court File No. CV-20-00645492-0000. The claim is Statement of Claim Against CSIS. The independent check on the documentary assertions in that defence is the OIC final report, digested in Five Things the OIC Final Report Established That Contradict CSIS’s Position. Delay is one fact. Contradiction with an oversight finding is another.
The late filing does not diminish the strength of Equibit’s case. The public evidence archive at equibitlawsuit.com continues to grow, and the full Factum of Equibit Group — which will synthesize all available evidence into one comprehensive record — is in active preparation.
Every procedural step, every delay, and every document filed becomes part of the permanent record.
Further Reading
The pursuit of accountability continues.
