Comments
- Rhona DesRoches, FAIR
October 26th, 2016 at 10:50 am
Recent decisions in respect to car accident cases in Ontario courts speak to the need to review the use of juries in the personal injury context. Years of influencing juries through PR by the Insurance Bureau of Canada have undermined not just the victims, but our justice system itself. Unfair and negative commentary about injured MVA victims in advertising paid for by the industry bear fruit ($$$) for insurers in our courts. Maligning the injured has become so pervasive that in Mandel v Fakhim, 2016 ONSC 6538 the Judge has expressed himself as powerless, frustrated and disturbed by the result. We shouldn’t be allowing our justice system to be used as a club to beat down victims and their claims; it’s abusive and unnecessarily expensive for the taxpayer who is paying the costs.
Rhona DesRoches, FAIR
Ending the use of jury trials in personal injury cases doesn’t have much to do with restricting freedom of speech for insurers who will undoubtedly continue with their fight to reduce claims costs under the guise of a fight on fraud. The constant maligning of MVA victims over decades by the IBC/insurers in advertising has had the intended consequence of negatively influencing the public and that has included potential jurors. This is not just one case. In Bruff-Murphy v Gunawardena, 2016 http://canlii.ca/t/gmr5x there’s an acknowledgement that the expert evidence that the Judge found questionable may not have been viewed in the same way by the jury. Juries are made up of ordinary people with the ordinary expectation that the evidence they are presented with is honest. Anyone working in the personal injury field knows that this is often not the case when it comes to Ontario’s ‘experts’ whose medical opinions are relied on by insurers to delay and deny legitimate claims. Auto insurance is a dirty game played out in our courts and if the flawed evidence is going to be allowed in the door you can’t expect the ordinary jurors to filter out the junk medicine replete with biased or flawed opinions and come to a just decision. According to StatsCan there are over 59,000 (2015) auto insurance related cases on the docket in Ontario; aside from pointing out that this is indicative of an unaddressed problem with Ontario’s auto insurance, it’s a massive amount of money being laid out by taxpayers when 50% of claims are denied and end up in hearings.
http://www.slaw.ca/2016/10/26/wednesday-whats-hot-on-canlii-188/comment-page-1/#comment-948175