Chaise Cafe owner sued by TD Bank

The owner of Chaise Cafe & Lounge, who gained notoriety for breaking public health orders during the COVID-19 pandemic, is being sued by a bank over an unpaid loan and line of credit.

Shea Ritchie owes $80,000 on a $100,000 loan his company took out in 2021, as well as $28,000 from a business line of credit, says a statement of claim filed by the Toronto Dominion Bank in the Manitoba Court of King’s Bench on Feb. 27.

The lawsuit says that in May 2025, a numbered company registered in Ritchie’s name stopped paying back the outstanding loan amount. The court filing says Ritchie applied, and was approved, for the loan in December 2021.

The outstanding amount is subject to a four per cent interest payment.

Ritchie also owes $28,707 on a business line of credit which he stopped repaying in August, the lawsuit says. The outstanding amount is subject to a 9.3 per cent interest payment.

“The plaintiff has demanded payment of the said debts from the defendants, but the defendants have neglected or refused and continue to neglect or refuse to pay the said debts to the plaintiff,” the lawsuit says.

On Monday, Ritchie claimed not to know about the $100,000 loan referenced in the lawsuit and said he wouldn’t comment on it.

Ritchie said he plans to leave Canada and is winding down his business dealings in Winnipeg, including putting Chaise Cafe & Lounge in the hands of other operators.

“I’m just not a fan of the Canadian system and believe there are better options out there,” Ritchie said.

Ritchie told the Free Press in 2022 he was selling both of his restaurants, Chaise Corydon and Chaise Cafe & Lounge on Provencher Boulevard, and moving out of the country because he believed Canada was becoming a communist state.

The Corydon Avenue location closed in 2023.

Ritchie’s comments about Canada go back to the pandemic, when he was fined multiple times for contravening provincial public health orders that put limits on restaurant capacity. He had said the pandemic “destroyed” his business and the government’s direction on how businesses could operate would eventually lead to the government restricting residents’ freedoms.

In 2023, one of the tickets he received was dismissed by the province, but Ritchie said at the time he had 10 outstanding fines totalling about $60,000.

Ritchie said Monday he has no plan to pay the fines.

“They can give me a trillion dollars in tickets, but I’m just gonna leave (the country) anyway,” he said.

A provincial spokesperson said the province doesn’t track the status of individual tickets.

As of June 2025, the province’s COVID-19 Ticket Outcomes dashboard said a tad more than $1.6 million in federal and provincial fines had been paid, of the more than $9.5 million in levies that had been issued.

nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca