CITATION: Tran v. Vietnamese Association, Toronto, 2026 ONSC 3577
SUPERIOR COURT OF JUSTICE - ONTARIO
RE:
DINH TRAN
Applicant
AND:
VIETNAMESE ASSOCIATION, TORONTO, AKA VAT
Respondent
BEFORE:
Justice Parghi
COUNSEL:
Spencer Tran, for the Applicant
Bakos Patrick, for the Respondent
HEARD:
June 11, 2026
ENDORSEMENT
1Mr. Tran seeks to have an urgent motion timetabled and heard. The motion seeks relief in respect of a dispute he is having with the respondent association. Mr. Tran says that his application to stand for election to the association’s board of directors was wrongfully denied in June 2025 and that his membership in the association was improperly terminated in July 2025. The next annual general meeting for the association is scheduled for June 21, 2026. At that time, new directors will be elected. Mr. Tran says that he has been wrongfully denied the right to be a candidate in that election and brings a motion for an injunction preventing the AGM from taking place until his dispute with the respondent has been adjudicated. Because the AGM is 10 days away, he seeks to have the motion heard on an urgent basis.
2I do not agree that the matter is urgent.
3I agree that the timing of the AGM on June 21 is indeed imminent. But any urgency in respect of that date is of Mr. Tran’s own making. The decisions to terminate his membership in the association and reject his application to seek election to the board were made back in June and July 2025. He commenced his underlying application on April 20, 2026. He brought this motion on approximately June 9, 2026.
4No satisfactory explanation is given to me for the roughly ten-month delay between the impugned decisions and the commencement of this application. Mr. Tran’s counsel says Mr. Tran has had a death in the family and that he is “recovering from surgery”. I am not, in principle, unsympathetic to those challenges. But the surgery at issue took place three and a half years ago. It was after the surgery that Mr. Tran applied to become a board member. I can only view counsel’s submission as overstated, at best, and somewhat misleading, at worst. Similarly, the death of Mr. Tran’s family member was over six months ago. That, too, is too long ago to reasonably account for his delay in bringing this motion.
5The civil justice system is overburdened. When matters are scheduled on an urgent basis, they “jump the queue” and leapfrog over litigants and matters that have been waiting for months or years to get heard. This queue jumping should only occur where necessary and appropriate – that is, where the matter is truly urgent. I see no urgency in the matter before me, other than urgency created by Mr. Tran’s own failure to seek relief in a timely way.
6I dismiss Mr. Tran’s request to have the matter handled as an urgent motion.
7The parties are to sort out a timetable for the steps of the motion. If they cannot agree to a timetable they may attend at Civil Practice Court to address the matter there. Once they have a timetable and have taken all the steps in the motion up to and including the exchange of facta, they may obtain a hearing date via requisition (if a hearing of under two hours is required) or Civil Practice Court (if a hearing of over two hours is required).
8Costs of this case conference are left to the judge who hears the motion.
Date: June 12, 2026