Ann: Compliance Testing Successfully Completed, page-479

Elements of Injurious Falsehood

In Mahon, Justice McCallum reiterated the four key elements required to succeed in an action for injurious falsehood:

• There must be a false statement of or concerning the plaintiff’s goods or business;
• The defendant must have published that statement to a third person;
• There must be malice on the part of the defendant; and
• The plaintiff must provide that there has been actual damage as a direct result of the statement.

Failure to satisfy these elements will be fatal to a claim and consequently, obtaining a successful result for injurious falsehood is very difficult. We now turn our attention to examining these elements in more detail.