L. Fitzgerald-Husek

The plaintiff suffered a severe traumatic brain injury in a multi-vehicle highway collision.

He lost control of his vehicle after being cut off by an unidentified driver, struck the median, and was subsequently T-boned by the defendant's vehicle.

The court found the unidentified driver 70% liable and the defendant 30% liable for following too closely.

The plaintiff was awarded over $3.2 million in damages, primarily for future care costs.

The plaintiff's claim against his own insurer for unidentified motorist coverage was dismissed because the identified defendant was found partially liable.

The plaintiff in a motor vehicle accident case moved to admit his out-of-court statements to police for substantive use, as he suffered from post-traumatic amnesia and could not testify to the events.

The court admitted the statements under the principled approach to hearsay, finding them necessary and sufficiently reliable, corroborated by an independent witness.

The court also excluded the investigating officer's written commentary in the accident report, ruling it was inadmissible opinion evidence beyond the officer's expertise.

The plaintiff in a motor vehicle accident action moved to admit several 911 calls into evidence under the principled approach to hearsay.

The plaintiff suffered a head injury and had no memory of the collision, and the callers were either unavailable or had impaired memories, establishing necessity.

The court found the calls possessed threshold reliability as they were made contemporaneously with the events to emergency services without motive to fabricate.

The motion was granted, and the 911 calls were ruled admissible.

The plaintiff sought a determination before trial on whether s. 2 of O. Reg. 347/13, which limits attendant care benefits provided by family members to the amount of their economic loss, applied where the motor vehicle accident occurred before the regulation came into force but the claim for attendant care was made afterward.

The court considered the evolution of the Statutory Accident Benefits Schedule and the Court of Appeal’s interpretation in Henry v. Gore Mutual Insurance Co. The court held the regulation constituted a substantive change to the law rather than a clarification and interfered with vested contractual rights under the insurance policy.

Because the regulation was silent on temporal application and no clear legislative intent to apply it retrospectively was demonstrated, the presumption against retrospectivity applied.

The amendment therefore did not apply to accidents occurring before February 1, 2014.