Mark Paquette

A motor vehicle accident occurred on April 25, 2015, on Scenic Road in Renfrew County involving two vehicles traveling in opposite directions, resulting in serious injury to a passenger.

Damages were resolved prior to trial.

The sole issue at trial was whether the driver of the oncoming vehicle (Prince) bore any liability for the accident.

The defendant driver (Vandenheuvel) admitted to crossing the centre line.

The court found that the plaintiff failed to establish any liability against Prince, dismissing the action against him.

The court found that Prince was driving in his own lane at a reasonable speed and took appropriate evasive action upon discovering the oncoming vehicle.

The defendant sought to qualify Mark Paquette as an expert witness in forensic collision reconstruction in a criminal negligence and dangerous driving causing death case.

The court declined to qualify him as an expert in forensic collision reconstruction but accepted that he should be qualified as an expert in the narrower field of preparing computer-generated graphic representations of accident reconstructions.

The court found that while the blind spot analysis methodology did not require expert assistance to understand, the computer-aided generation of graphic representations overlaid on scale diagrams required specialized knowledge beyond the trier of fact's ken.