OTTAWA, ON: The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms announces that lawyers have filed a motion for a permanent stay of proceedings in the $290 million class action lawsuit against Freedom Convoy protestors and donors. The motion arises from the plaintiffs’ failure to immediately disclose a settlement agreement reached in April 2024 with one of the defendants.
The lawsuit, launched in February 2022 by Ottawa residents Zexi Li and Geoffrey Delaney, Happy Goat Coffee Company, and a local union, seeks $290 million in damages from individuals alleged to have organized or supported the Freedom Convoy protest on Parliament Hill during January and February 2022.
The claim targets protestors as well as donors, alleging that contributors “knew or ought to have known” their donations would contribute to alleged nuisance harms such as horn honking and idling trucks in downtown Ottawa.
The motion follows a January 29, 2026 case conference, at which defence counsel advised the Court that they had recently learned that the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Paul Champ, had entered into a settlement agreement with one of the defendants in April 2024.
The defendant was self-represented at the time. The agreement required him to provide documents to the plaintiffs for use against other defendants, participate in a private interview of up to five hours, provide an affidavit in support of the plaintiffs, make himself available for cross-examination, and pay $60,000 in exchange for his release from the action.
Although Ontario law requires such types of partial settlement agreements to be disclosed immediately to the other parties in the litigation, in this case the agreement was not disclosed to other defence counsel until January 27, 2026, nearly twenty-two months after it was executed.
Counsel for the remaining defendants had previously requested disclosure of any such agreements but were simply told that it was “not an appropriate time.”
Constitutional lawyer James Manson, who represents several of the defendants including protestors and donors, said, “The integrity of the justice system depends on transparency between all parties.”
“When one side secretly enters into an agreement with a defendant that requires cooperation against others, and then does not disclose that agreement immediately, as required by law, the basic fairness of the process is fundamentally undermined. Courts cannot permit litigation to proceed on a foundation that has been compromised in this way,” he added.
