On 4/15/2021 10:48 AM, bruce bowser wrote:
> On Wednesday, April 14, 2021 at 10:16:01 PM UTC-4, Dave Smith wrote:
>> On 2021-04-14 5:55 p.m., jmcquown wrote:
>>
>>> The State has very little to do with liability insurance purchased by a
>>> company. Maybe you're thinking of Worker's Comp; who funds it varies by
>>> State. 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. 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.
>
> The employer will probably win on appeal.
>

If he hasn't won on appeal by now, he never will. The court decision
was handed down 20 years ago.