“A settlement agreement is subject to the general law of contract. For a settlement agreement to exist, the court must find the parties (i) had a mutual intention to create a legally binding contract and (ii) reached agreement on all of the essential terms of the settlement: Olivieri v. Sherman (2007), 2007 ONCA 491 (CanLII), 86 O.R. (3d) 778 (C.A.), at para. 41. Whether the parties have manifested mutual assent to specific terms usually is determined from their overt acts: Bogue v. Bogue (1999), 1999 CanLII 3284 (ON CA), 46 O.R. (3d) 1 (C.A.), at para. 17. Or, as described by this court in McLean v. McLean, 2013 ONCA 788, 118 O.R. (3d) 216, at para. 10, a court must employ an objective approach to the evidence, determining “what a reasonable observer would have believed the parties intended, taking into consideration the evidence of all the parties as well as the surrounding documentary evidence.”
Where the parties reduce their bargain to writing, a court determines the parties’ intentions in accordance with the language used in the written document, having regard to the objective evidence of the factual matrix: Salah v. Timothy’s Coffees of the World Inc., 2010 ONCA 673, 268 O.A.C. 276, at para. 16.
Oral contracts, such as the one at issue in the present case, present different challenges regarding the issues of formation and interpretation. As put by Angela Swan and Jakub Adamski in Canadian Contract Law, 3rd ed. (Markham, ON: LexisNexis, 2012), at §2.27:
There is no general rule against the enforcement of oral promises, but the fact that a promise is oral suggests that its making may not have been accompanied by anything that sufficiently brought home to the parties the significance of what they were doing and, of course, the terms of an oral promise are no more certain than the parties’ recollections of them.”