Court of Appeal for Ontario

Date: 2025-04-25
Docket: M55781 (COA-24-CV-0554)
Panel: J.C. MacPherson, L.B. Roberts, D.A. Wilson JJ.A.

Between

Noelle Heen-Lune Rathee
Applicant (Respondent/Responding Party)

and

Rajinder Singh Rathee
Respondent (Appellant/Moving Party)

Counsel:
Ilana Zylberman Dembo and Courtney Palmer, for the appellant/moving party
Lorne Wolfson, for the respondent/responding party

Heard: 2025-04-24

Reasons for Decision

Background

1The parties were married for seven years. After the marriage dissolved, for several years the husband, a wealthy man based on a very successful medical career, provided substantial support to his wife and their only child.

2In 2019, the parties decided to place their remaining financial issues before an arbitrator. On the issue of spousal support, the arbitrator ordered the husband to pay the wife a lump sum of $250,000.

3The wife appealed this component of the arbitration award. She sought an award of $1,000,000. The appeal judge of the Superior Court of Justice allowed the appeal and ordered the husband to make a lump sum payment of $1,893,603 to the wife.

4The husband appealed this decision to this court. In Rathee v. Rathee, 2024 ONCA 912, released on December 18, 2024, this court allowed the appeal and awarded the wife “a lump-sum after-tax amount of $678,888 in spousal support” (at para. 47).

The Motion

[5] On this motion the husband now seeks:
“An Order amending the Reasons … dated December 18, 2024 (2024 ONCA 912), to correct the amount of lump sum spousal support payable by the Appellant … to the Respondent … from $678,888 to $305,650.80”.

6The anchor for the husband’s position is Rule 59.06(1) of the Rules of Civil Procedure, R.R.O. 1990, Reg. 194:

An order that contains an error arising from an accidental slip or omission … may be amended on a motion in the proceeding.

7The husband submits that this court’s accidental slip in its judgment was its omission of several factors that were required inputs under the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines (“SSAGs”) – the wife’s income, the amounts paid by both parties for their daughter’s special or ordinary expenses, and the total amount of Table support paid by the husband to the wife. By inadvertently omitting these additional necessary inputs for calculating spousal support under the SSAGs, the court did not achieve the correct mid-point spousal support award under the SSAGs as it intended.

Analysis

8We do not accept this submission. The starting point is, as stated by this court in Liu v. Jin Qiu, 2022 ONCA 544, at para. 3:

“Rule 59.06(1) applies where an order contains an accidental slip or omission or requires amendment on a particular on which the court did not adjudicate.”

9Justice Perell of the Superior Court of Justice provided a useful discussion of Rule 59.06(1) in Trustees of the Millwright Regional Council of Ontario Pension Trust Fund v. Celestica Inc., 2013 ONSC 1502, at paras. 30 and 32:

Rule 59.06(1) is designed to amend judgments containing a slip or error, errors which are clerical, mathematical or due to misadventure or oversight. The rule is designed to amend judgments containing a slip, not to set aside judgments resulting from a slip in judicial reasoning….

Rule 59.06(1) is not designed to be a disguised means to review errors in the making of the Reasons for Decision; rather, it is designed to correct errors in memorializing the Reasons into a formal order or judgment.

Under rule 59.06(1), the Court has the power to amend an order where there has been an error in expressing the manifest intention of the Court…. [Cases and citations omitted.]

10The husband’s submissions on this motion do not come within this framework. The husband’s complaint is that this court did not take proper account of three relevant factors in its analysis and quantification of what he owed in spousal support. This is a substantive attack on the structure of the judgment and the factors considered by the court in the judgment. Accordingly, it is not a slip or omission that is, in Perell J.’s words, “clerical, mathematical or due to misadventure or oversight”.

11In short, the proper words on which the husband needs to focus if he wants to challenge this court’s judgment are “leave to appeal”, not “slip” and “omission”.

Disposition

12The motion is dismissed. The wife is entitled to her costs of the motion fixed at $7,500, inclusive of disbursements and HST.

J.C. MacPherson J.A.
L.B. Roberts J.A.
D.A. Wilson J.A.