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.