See all posts by Diamond and Diamond Lawyers
Every so often a story lands in the Toronto news cycle that makes thousands of people sit up and think about an appointment they had years ago. A physician is stripped of their licence. The details are grim. The coverage runs for two or three days, and then it moves on.
What the coverage almost never explains is what any of it means for the people who were actually in that examination room.
In January 2026, the Ontario Physicians and Surgeons Discipline Tribunal revoked the certificate of registration of a Toronto physician who had practised proctology and gastroenterology for more than three decades. The Tribunal found that he had failed to maintain the standard of practice of the profession, that he had engaged in conduct that would reasonably be regarded as disgraceful, dishonourable or unprofessional, and that he was incompetent. Its findings covered examinations it determined were unnecessary or contraindicated, consent that was not properly obtained for the specific procedures delivered, and a failure to properly store and destroy sensitive patient photographs.
Former patients reading that news had an obvious question, and it is one that Ontario’s regulatory system is not built to answer: what happens to me now?
Revocation Is Not Compensation
Here is the thing most people get wrong, and it is an understandable mistake.
When a regulator strips a physician of their licence, it looks like the end of the story. It reads like justice. It is not, in any legal sense, a resolution for the patients involved.
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario exists to regulate physicians and protect the public. Its disciplinary arm can reprimand, restrict, suspend or revoke. What it cannot do, what it has no mechanism to do, is award a single dollar to anyone who was harmed. A patient who lost income, needed corrective surgery, or came away with a lasting injury gets nothing from a revocation except the knowledge that it happened.
Compensation in Ontario runs through an entirely separate channel: a civil claim, brought by the patient, in the courts. The two processes do not talk to each other. Filing a complaint with the College does not start a civil claim, and a civil claim does not require you to have complained first. You can do both, either, or neither.
That separation catches people out constantly. Many patients assume that because they told the College, the system is handling it. The system is handling the physician. Nobody is handling them.
The Public Record Is More Useful Than People Realise
If you are trying to work out whether a physician you saw has a disciplinary history, you do not need to rely on news coverage. Ontario publishes a great deal of this material, and it is free.
The CPSO public register carries an entry for every physician in the province. It shows registration status, practice locations, and — critically — any findings of professional misconduct or incompetence, restrictions on practice, cautions, and the summary of any discipline decision. A revoked physician’s entry stays up. So does the record of what was found.
Decisions of the Ontario Physicians and Surgeons Discipline Tribunal are published as well, and the full written reasons are often available through CanLII, Canada’s free legal database. Those reasons are usually far more detailed than any news article, because they set out the specific conduct, the number of patients involved, and the period the findings cover.
For a patient trying to figure out whether their own experience fits a pattern, the written reasons are the single most useful document available and almost nobody reads them, because almost nobody knows they exist.
Consent Is Where a Great Many of These Cases Live
Ask most people what medical malpractice means and they will describe a surgical error. A mistake with the scalpel. Something visibly, dramatically wrong.
A large share of Ontario cases turn on something quieter: whether the patient actually agreed to what happened to them.
Under Ontario’s Health Care Consent Act, 1996, consent to treatment has to relate to the specific treatment proposed, and it has to be informed. That means the patient received the information a reasonable person in their position would need: what the treatment involves, its expected benefits, its material risks and side effects, what the alternatives were, and what would likely happen if they declined. The CPSO’s own policy on consent sets the same expectation on physicians.
A signature on a broad form at reception, given before you have been examined or diagnosed, is not that. And a patient who is already sedated cannot consent to a procedure that gets decided on while they are unconscious.
Jeremy Syrtash, who heads the firm’s medical malpractice litigation, notes that the courts do not stop at the individual patient either.
“The court, in assessing whether there was informed consent, looks not just at what the patient would have done, but at what a reasonable patient would have done as well.”
— Jeremy Syrtash, Head of Medical Malpractice Litigation, Diamond and Diamond Lawyers
That matters for the situation patients most often describe: going in for one thing and coming out having had another.
“I have had a case where a patient goes in for one procedure and they get another procedure. Doctors sometimes go ahead and carry out other procedures even though they were not indicated. That is another basis of negligence.”
— Jeremy Syrtash
Consider how ordinary this can look from the patient’s side. Someone attends a clinic about a persistent, embarrassing complaint they have been putting off for months. They sign what they are handed. They are sedated for what they understand to be an examination. They wake up having had a procedure nobody discussed with them, carrying risks nobody mentioned, that they were never given the chance to decline or to think about overnight.
The procedure might have been performed perfectly well. That is not the point. The choice was never theirs to make, and in Canadian law that can amount to negligence or, depending on the circumstances, battery.
This is why patients whose treatment “seemed fine” sometimes turn out to have the clearest claims of anyone.
Your Records Belong to You
The most common reason people give for not looking into this is that they no longer have anything to look at. The clinic has closed. The physician is gone. They assume the paper trail went with them.
It did not. Under the Personal Health Information Protection Act, 2004, you have a right of access to your own health records, and health information custodians are required to retain and secure them. Records from a practice that has shut down still have to be kept and still have to be made available to you. The Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario oversees that regime and publishes guidance on how access works.
The same statute covers something patients often find harder to talk about than a physical injury: images. Photographs of a patient’s body taken in a clinical setting are personal health information. So is a video of a procedure. Where those are stored improperly, or shown to anyone without consent, that is a distinct harm in its own right, not a lesser one, and not one that requires you to have been physically injured as well.
People carry that kind of thing quietly for years. It is worth knowing that Ontario law treats it as a real wrong rather than an embarrassment to be absorbed.
What Actually to Do
If you were treated by a physician who has since lost their licence, and something about the experience has stayed with you:
- Look up the register entry. Find out precisely what was found, over what period, and whether the findings resemble your own experience.
- Request your records. Ask the practice, its successor, or the custodian holding them. You do not need a reason and you do not need a lawyer to ask.
- Write down what you remember now. What you were told would happen, what you signed, what you were told afterwards, and how you have been since. Memory of a clinical appointment fades quickly, and contemporaneous notes are worth a great deal later.
- Get the file read by someone who reads them for a living. Most patients cannot tell from their own chart whether the care fell below standard. That is not a failure on their part, it is a question that requires an independent medical opinion, which is what a review is for.
- Do not assume that a “fine” outcome means nothing happened. Unnecessary procedures and absent consent are wrongs whether or not they left a mark.
Where This Leaves Patients
There is an uncomfortable asymmetry in how these stories end. The regulator acts, the headline runs, and the physician’s career is over. Meanwhile the people whose appointments generated the complaints in the first place are left holding a set of questions that the process was never designed to answer.
Ontario does give those patients a route. It is just a different route, it starts with them rather than with the College, and it begins with something as unglamorous as a request for a copy of their own chart.
Talk to a Medical Malpractice Lawyer Who Handles Ontario Medical Files
If you were treated by a physician whose licence has since been revoked, or you have questions about consent, your records, or the care you received, it costs nothing to ask. Diamond and Diamond Lawyers has information for former patients of Dr. Ashwin Maharaj, and a broader overview of medical malpractice claims in Ontario.
The team of lawyers at Diamond and Diamond have experience handling medical malpractice claims. Call the 24/7 injury hotline at 1-800-567-HURT to speak to someone. Consultations and case evaluations are free, and enquiries are treated confidentially.
About Jeremy Diamond
