On 2021-04-14 5:55 p.m., jmcquown wrote:

> The State has very little to do with liability insurance purchased by a
> company.Â* Maybe you're thinking of Worker's Comp; who funds it varies by
> State.Â* At any rate, my friends who worked there told me some of the
> guys on the line would start drinking at lunch and keep on going.Â* NOT a
> good idea.
>
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...rticle4144089/

An Ontario Superior Court judge has found an employer partly liable for
injuries suffered by a receptionist who drank at an office Christmas
party, drank more at a bar afterward, and then tried to drive home in a
snowstorm, ignoring offers of a ride.

In a 20-page judgment issued yesterday, Mr. Justice Clair Marchand said
Linda Hunt's boss noticed she was tipsy during the Friday-afternoon
party in a Barrie real-estate office in 1994, and failed in his duty to
keep her from harm.

The judge said it was not enough for the boss to offer to call her
husband and ask him to pick her up if she planned to keep drinking; it
was not enough to make a general offer of cab rides to employees, and it
did not get the boss off the hook when a co-worker offered Ms. Hunt a lift.

Ms. Hunt was convicted of impaired driving after losing control of her
four-wheel-drive vehicle on her way home and colliding with a truck. The
crash left her with severe injuries, including brain damage, and she is
unable to work.

In a lawsuit that has inspired television satire and irate letters to
newspapers, Judge Marchand found her 75-per-cent responsible for her
pain and financial loss.

He placed the remaining responsibility jointly on her employer, Sutton
Group Incentive Realty Inc., and the bar, P.J.'s Pub.

The bar has gone out of business without insurance coverage, leaving
Sutton Group liable for the 25-per-cent damages, calculated by the judge
at about $288,000 plus interest and legal costs.

Ms. Hunt's lawyer, Roger Oatley, and other personal-injury specialists
said it appeared to be the first time a Canadian court had held an
employer partly responsible for car-crash injuries suffered by an
employee who got drunk at a company social function. In 1999, a jury in
London, Ont., found a company partly liable for injuries suffered by a
second driver in an accident caused by a worker who had taken part in a
drinking session in a company parking lot.

In the Hunt case, Judge Marchand rejected the real-estate firm's
argument that taking Ms. Hunt's keys would have amounted to theft and
forcing her into a taxi would have been equivalent to kidnapping.

"I find that had her employer insisted on her leaving the keys at the
office or on her taking a cab home at his expense, if indeed he was
prepared to do so, [it]would have resulted in the plaintiff having no
alternative but to accept. Furthermore, he could easily have phoned her
husband to come and pick her up. He could even have called police if
need be."

Moreover, the employer "ought to have foreseen that, by maintaining an
open and unsupervised bar, he would be incapable of monitoring the
alcohol consumption of his employee, which led to her danger," he said.

Don Jerry, owner and president of the firm, said yesterday he is angry
about the outcome of the trial, which ended in October.

"Based on this decision, nobody should ever, ever buy another person a
drink, because you might get sued," he said. "Why do they even have a
drinking age? If people can't be held responsible for their own actions,
then maybe the age should be raised to 100."

He said he will ask his insurance company to appeal the decision on
grounds that Judge Marchand dismissed the jury in mid-trial.

The judge accepted a request from Ms. Hunt's lawyers to try the case
without a jury because of the media glare and the complexity of the
evidence. Letters to newspapers had suggested that Ms. Hunt was trying
to shift blame for her own actions, and her claim was the subject of a
Royal Canadian Air Farce joke.

Mr. Jerry said he is sure the jury would have approved of his efforts to
stop Ms. Hunt from drinking and driving. He said it was not his fault
that she went to a bar to continue drinking.

"The jury was made up of people like you and I," he said. "They had the
common sense to know you don't go suing somebody because you drank too
much."

At her Wasaga Beach home yesterday, Ms. Hunt, who swears she will never
drink alcohol again, said she accepts most of the responsibility for her
drunken actions.

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