Article edited by Walter W. Kubitz, KC, a personal injury lawyer in Calgary, Alberta.

Two Collisions on the Same Day

Walter Kubitz KC and Shiv Ganesh were trial counsel for the Plaintiff in Artindale-Eeles v Mercer, 2024 ABKB 233. It was a three-week trial.

Justice Hillier J awarded $88,000 in general damages to Ms. Artindale-Eeles who was suffering ongoing pain and psychological injuries resulting from a rear-end motor vehicle accident. Assessment of Ms. Artindale-Eeles’ damages was complicated by issues of causation, being in two collisions on the same day, and the fact that she had both pre-existing conditions and suffered four post-accident slip and fall or lifting incidents which aggravated her injuries.

Ms. Artindale-Eeles was involved in two accidents while on the way home from work. In the first accident, she was unable to stop in slippery conditions and slid into the back of another vehicle. After backing up and remaining on the scene, as instructed by the fire chief, she was struck from behind by a second vehicle driven by the RCMP. Ms. Artindale-Eeles described the first accident as a “tap” in which she was not injured, and the second RCMP accident as a much more forceful impact, which caused her vehicle to spin roughly 180 degrees.

While Hillier J was critical of her credibility, he found nothing in the evidence to support a reasonable inference that the first accident caused injuries to her shoulder and neck, or the PTSD and driving phobia that developed post-accident. He did, however, find that Ms. Artindale-Eeles clearly suffered physical and psychological injury as a result of the second RCMP accident. While agreeing that the defendants were not required to compensate for any debilitating effects of the Ms. Artindale-Eeles’ pre-existing conditions (which included chronic pain, anxiety and PTSD), Hillier J nonetheless reiterated the thin-skull rule that the defendants take the plaintiff as they find her, even if she is more vulnerable than others to the effects of physical and psychological injury.

With respect to the post-accident slip and fall events, Hillier J considered their impact as part of the remoteness analysis. He found that the plaintiff “was vulnerable to further or continued health issues while she took time to recover to her pre-existing, sub-optimal health”, and the slip-and-falls were not intervening events:

205 In this case, I find the exacerbations caused by the Post-Collision Incidents were individually foreseeable as reasonable risks in daily living. It was reasonably within the contemplation of the Defendants that the Plaintiff would aggravate her injuries in the course of her day-to-day living. All four of the Post-Collision Incidents occurred in the context of typical injuries that take place in everyday life. The first two, including the most damaging slip and fall, occurred during the first year; all four arose while Ms. Artindale-Eeles was still on restricted work duties. Therefore, the Post-Collision Incidents affecting the left shoulder area were not too remote to hold the Defendants liable. [emphasis added]

Based on the above analysis, Hillier J found that a tear to soft tissue in Ms. Artindale-Eeles’ shoulder, which resulted from a post-accident fall, was nonetheless causally related to the accident.
(With thinks to Bottom Line Research for this summary).