OP/ED: Is a person's life without value because they don't generate income?
By Rob Leggett
This past weekend my wife and I had the opportunity to spend some time with friends of ours, and during the day the discussion turned to wrongful death laws in B.C.
Terry Napora (Terry Napora Law Offices) and Derek Miura (Derek Miura Law Corporation) informed me of the gross injustice families face in B.C .when a loved one is killed. While it’s obvious why, as lawyers, they would be concerned with this issue, but should we, as ordinary citizens, be concerned as well? Picture, if you are able to, driving along, maybe you are coming home from a beautiful day at the beach, or maybe you just went out to get groceries, and as you go through an intersection on the green light, a daydreaming driver runs through his red light and slams into your car, instantly killing one of your kids. This would be you worst nightmare, am I right? You’ve done nothing wrong, and in a blink of an eye your precious child is gone, taken from you by someone else’s irresponsiblity, and in your anguish you choose to sue the driver for your loss. But do you know what your child’s life is worth under the current B.C. laws? …Nothing. That’s right, not a damn thing. You are not entitled to any financial compensation when a child, senior or person with a disability loses their life and the reason behind this is because their lives are estimated under the law to be valueless: they were not working and were not supporting dependents and, even then, in wrongful death cases, a jury cannot punish stupidity, gross negligence, or wanton neglect by awarding punitive damages. In B.C., if a family member is murdered, the survivor cannot get punitive damages against the wrongdoer. Even if a jury wants to award punitive damages in a case, the law would not permit them to do so. Unless the deceased was a main source of income, there isn’t much financial compensation and about all you can hope for is a payment for funeral expenses. This is because B.C.’s Family Compensation Act was modelled after British law. It allows the courts to compensate for lost income, but only if the deceased was a wage earner who was expected to continue earning income for some time. When older people, the disabled or children die unnecessarily, their families almost always have very little options in civil court. So what exactly does this mean? If a driver accidentally runs over someone crossing the street, the amount the pedestrian can sue for depends only on how severe his injuries are, but if that same driver puts his car in reverse and runs over him again and makes him a quadriplegic, the amount he can sue for is much greater, and if the same driver drives forward again, killing the pedestrian, the amount the driver will have to pay is much lower than if he had left him alive. This is to say, the way B.C. civil law is currently structured, it would be better to make sure you had killed the person you accidently ran over and not just injured them. (That’s not factoring in criminal repercussions, of course) You can kill people pretty much with impunity and there are no civil consequences, and this same lack of compensation applies to any type of wrongful death in B.C. – even gross negligence at the hands of doctors or hospitals. We must ask ourselves what kind of justice system we have when we are prevented from receiving punitive damages when someone has done something so wrong that it resulted in the loss of a loved one’s life. The idea that a life has no value is wrong and needs to change. There have been proposals on reforming B.C.’s wrongful death cases for years, but there is no sign anyone in the government is listening or taking the issue very seriously. It has become clear that it is up to us, as citizens, to demand that the law respect the value we place on a life …especially of our children, the elderly and the disabled.
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