What changed
- From 14 October 2025 rule 1.1 of the Family Law Rules names the authorized software by location: the Ontario Courts Public Portal for a case commenced or continued in the City of Toronto, and Justice Services Online for any other case.
- Submitting a document is not filing it. Under subrule 1.1(4) nothing is filed or issued until the software or the clerk confirms it in writing, and the filing date is the date in that confirmation.
- Four rules that name a filing route were amended to read Justice Services Online or the Ontario Courts Public Portal, whichever is available.
What changed on 14 October 2025
O. Reg. 228/25 revoked subrules 1.1(1) to (3) of the Family Law Rules and substituted new ones. The replacement says that a document which may or must be filed or issued under the rules may be submitted electronically through the software authorized by the Ministry of the Attorney General, provided that software handles the document and the person filing has agreed to its terms of use and given an email address at which they accept documents from the court.
The new subrule 1.1(2) then names the software, and it names two of them rather than one. The old definition of the Justice Services Online website in subrule 2(1) was revoked at the same time.
The regulation was made on 29 September 2025, filed on 1 October 2025 and published in the Ontario Gazette on 18 October 2025. Its own commencement section brought most of it into force on 14 October 2025.
Which portal applies to my case?
It turns on where the case sits. For a case commenced or continued in the City of Toronto the authorized software is the one published as the Ontario Courts Public Portal. For any other case it is the software available through the Justice Services Online website.
The test is the case, not the person. A Brampton resident whose file was commenced in Toronto is on the Toronto portal, and the wording reaches a case continued there as well as one commenced there.
Toronto was handled in stages. The same regulation first added a subrule saying rule 1.1 did not apply to Toronto cases at all, in force 4 October 2025, then revoked that subrule ten days later when the two-portal wording took over.
Where the deadline actually falls
Subrule 1.1(4) is the one to read before any deadline. Despite subrule (1), a document submitted to the authorized software is not filed or issued for the purposes of the rules unless the filing or issuance is confirmed in writing by the software or by the clerk, and it is considered to have been filed or issued on the date indicated in that confirmation.
So the date on the screen when a document is uploaded is not the filing date. The filing date is the one the confirmation gives, and until the confirmation arrives nothing has been filed at all.
That subrule is not new. It has been in the rules since 2020 and O. Reg. 228/25 only tidied a cross-reference in it. It is worth restating because the two-portal change puts more people through an unfamiliar system, and an unfamiliar system is where a submission gets mistaken for a filing.
Which filings the change touches
Four rules that set out how to get a document to the clerk were amended to read Justice Services Online or the Ontario Courts Public Portal, whichever is available.
Three of them are confirmations, and each carries its own deadline: the confirmation of motion in Form 14C under rule 14, the confirmation of conference in Form 17F under rule 17, and the confirmation of issues for a binding judicial dispute resolution hearing under rule 43. The fourth is the notice the Director's office gives on a filing under rule 26.
Those are the filings where subrule 1.1(4) matters most, because a confirmation that has to be in the clerk's hands a set number of days before a hearing is a document with a date attached to it.
The detail sits on family law in Ontario, which is kept current as the rules move.
