General

[Mar]

In a rare aberration of modern jurisprudence the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on the side of common sense.

In a case where a local man sued a water-bottling facility for over three hundred-thousand dollars in alleged damages after he found one and a half dead flies in a large bottle of water delivered to his house for use in a water dispensing cooler. He alleges that the fly found in the water caused such deep psychological damage as to ruin his sex-life and his business.

Although the court seems to have skirted the issue as to whether or not the damage was legitimate (as this was not the ‘question of law’ being addressed by the SCOC) they did address the ‘reasonably foreseeable’ element of the tort – and found that the defendant to the action could not have reasonably foreseen the alleged harm that arose. To establish negligence (here) the Plaintiff must prove: A duty of care exists, a breach of the duty of care, causation, proximate cause and harm.

Here is the full article:

SCOC rejects fly-in-water appeal
Janice Tibbetts , Canwest News Service
Published: Thursday, May 22, 2008
OTTAWA - A hairdresser who claimed the torment of finding dead flies in his bottled water wrecked his sleep, his sex life, his business and his ability to take showers has lost his bid for psychological damages in a ruling Thursday morning in the Supreme Court of Canada.
The decision means Martin Mustapha loses the $341,000 award he won from Culligan Canada after convincing a judge that he suffered enduring distress when he noticed one whole fly and another half one in an unopened bottle of drinking water as he was loading it on to his cooler in his Windsor, Ont., home six years ago.
At issue before the court was whether the damages suffered by Mustapha were "reasonably foreseeable" - a legal benchmark for negligence.
"I conclude that the loss suffered by the plaintiff was too remote to be reasonably foreseen and that consequently, he cannot recover damages from the defendant," Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote in the 9-0 ruling.
The case has drawn wide attention in legal circles, leaving some observers to question why the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and others to speculate that the ruling would finally set guidelines on the scope of psychiatric injury in Canadian law.
The trial judge in the case accepted that Mustapha suffered a "major depressive disorder" that was triggered by spotting the fly in his drinking water just after his wife had cleaned the bottle to eliminate germs.
Mustapha came to Canada from Lebanon in 1976 when he was 16 years old. A decade later, a Culligan Canada representative convinced him to keep a cooler of water in his home, which he was told was particularly beneficial for pregnant women and children.
The family bought into the idea in a big way - keeping only Culligan water in their home for the next 15 years.
That all changed in 2001 after the fly incident. Mustapha said he could not get it out of his mind. He said he felt nauseous and suffered abdominal pain. He started avoided all things having to do with water - even drinking it and taking showers. He sought psychological treatment and medication.
"He pictures flies walking on animal feces or rotten food and then being in his supposedly pure drinking water," Justice John Brockenshire, of the Ontario Superior Court, wrote in his 2005 ruling.
While acknowledging the reaction seemed to be "objectively bizarre," Brockenshire stressed that Mustapha's obsession with cleanliness and predisposed aversion to insects explained his disorder.
Culligan appealed to the Ontario Court of Appeal, which overturned the lower court ruling on the grounds that the company could not have reasonably foreseen the effect of the dead fly and, therefore, was not negligent. Furthermore, Mustapha never actually drank the water.

[Drum]

Friggin' Canadians take the fun out of everything but paintball.

[Harbinger[TG]]

They paintball in Canada?

[Marauder_Pilot]

No.

[John Satclaire]

I dunno, this sounds like a pretty clear case of duty (water without flies in it), breach (water with a fly in it), causation both but for and proximate (seeing the tainted water lead to the harm), and harm (he's now stressed about water and life in general). Admittedly, no reasonable person would think that a fly in a water jug would cause all that harm, but hey, there's the eggshell plaintiff rule! Some distress at seeing the fly in there is reasonably foreseeable, surely.

Drum, care to weigh in?

[Harbinger[TG]]

Someone should tell him the average human swallows 7+ spiders in their sleep.

[Surestick]

Originally Posted by John Satclaire

I dunno, this sounds like a pretty clear case of duty (water without flies in it), breach (water with a fly in it), causation both but for and proximate (seeing the tainted water lead to the harm), and harm (he's now stressed about water and life in general). Admittedly, no reasonable person would think that a fly in a water jug would cause all that harm, but hey, there's the eggshell plaintiff rule! Some distress at seeing the fly in there is reasonably foreseeable, surely.

Drum, care to weigh in?

What's the eggshell plaintiff rule?

[John Satclaire]

Originally Posted by Surestick

What's the eggshell plaintiff rule?

See Woman indicted in MySpace hoax that caused suicide, et seq.

[Surestick]

I don't see that MySpace suicide thing being at all similar to this though.
In the MySpace case the woman knew the girl had a problem with depression and knowingly did something that was likely to cause the girl suffering.
In this case a mistake was made and the suffering it allegedly caused was unforeseeable.
If the water bottle company had deliberately put insects in a water bottle delivered to someone who they knew had a phobia or something I can see it being similar but this water bottle thing sounds like something that should be handled by the health dept, not by the courts.

[Mar]

Originally Posted by Surestick

What's the eggshell plaintiff rule?

We refer to it here as the "thin skull rule" and it states that you take your person/victim as you find them. We apply it here (to my understanding) in Criminal proceedings as well, as a local Crown Attorney was discussing it in a one-punch murder case here in Ottawa.

John - I like what you are saying from a "he can make it work" point of view: The original trial judge awarded the damages, they were subsequently overturned on appeal, and upheld at the SCC. So somewhere, someone (wiser than I) saw it the way you described it; that much is for certain.