Does a plaintiff have to serve default judgment materials on defendants even though defences have not been filed?

On many occasions, this court has required plaintiffs to serve default judgment motion materials on defendants, even though defences have not been filed. Recently, in Madison Homes v. Ng, 2021 ONSC 3104, J. Wilson J. described this as a “Toronto best practice”. I see no reason why it would not be an equally good practice outside Toronto, particularly where, as here, there is reason to believe that if the default judgments requested by the plaintiff were granted, the likely if not inevitable result would be nine motions to set the judgments aside.