What standard is expected of a driver confronted with an emergency situation? ONCA upholds a summary judgment motion ruling that a reactive driver was not negligent.
The Ontario Court of Appeal recently upheld a summary judgment motion ruling that there was nothing negligent about the response of a driver to an unexpected hazard when faced with an oncoming vehicle drifting into his lane.
The Facts
Morales v. Laguardia dealt with a summary judgment motion brought by the co-Defendant Franchetto arising from a head-on collision. The accident resulted in significant injuries for all five occupants of the two vehicles involved.
The Defendant, Laguardia, was driving a vehicle in which the Plaintiff, Morales, and one other individual, Rezi, were passengers. They had been partying all day and night, consuming alcohol and cannabis without any sleep. Laguardia offered the two passengers a ride home in his mother’s vehicle. The Plaintiff won a game of rock-paper-scissors against Rezi and scored himself a seat next to the driver. At the time of the accident, Laguardia was travelling eastbound on Highway 9 at a speed of slightly over 100 km/h in a zone with a speed limit of 80 km/h.
The co-Defendant, Franchetto, an off-duty firefighter, was driving his spouse to a rehabilitation centre that evening. He was travelling westbound at a speed just shy of 90 km/h in an area of the highway with a speed limit of 80 km/h. A black SUV was travelling in front of him.
Laguardia had fallen asleep in the moments leading up to the accident, and had not awoken by the time of the accident. His two passengers, the Plaintiffs, were also asleep at the time. His vehicle started to drift over the center line, into oncoming traffic.
Franchetto saw the black SUV in front of him swerve to avoid something on the road. He then realized that Laguardia’s vehicle was drifting into his lane. The experts agreed that Franchetto had about five seconds to react from the time the emergency arose to the time that the collision occurred. In response, Franchetto immediately attempted to steer his vehicle toward the shoulder of the road. Two seconds later, he saw that the Laguardia vehicle was also heading toward the shoulder. He then decided to steer to the left and hit his brakes, but the two vehicles collided head-on.
The two passengers of the Laguardia vehicle not only sued Laguardia for damages resulting from their injuries, but they also sued Franchetto, the driver of the westbound vehicle.
Summary Judgment Motion and Appeal
Summary judgment was granted in favour of Franchetto. The motions judge found that no jury, properly instructed, would be able to reasonably find Franchetto negligent.
The Plaintiffs appealed, alleging among other things that the motion judge erred in both fact and law.
On appeal, a three-member panel of the ONCA concluded that there was no error in the motion judge’s finding that there was no genuine issue requiring a trial. The motion judge correctly interpreted and applied the standard of care. The ONCA rejected that the motion judge had to accept the expert evidence on behalf of the Plaintiffs regarding standard of care. The issue could be determined on summary judgment despite conflicting expert evidence.
Standard of Care
Franchetto’s expert advanced an “agony of the moment” theory, also known as the doctrine of emergency. The theory is that, where a driver’s options are severely limited due to lack of time to make real-time decisions, the standard of care must be lower.
To the contrary, the Plaintiffs/Appellants’ expert opined that there was enough time for Franchetto to either avoid the accident or lessen the severity of the collision.
In upholding summary judgment, the ONCA referenced the following passage from the Supreme Court of Canada in Gill v. Canadian Pacific Railway, 1973 CanLII 2 (SCC):
It is trite law that faced with a sudden emergency for the creation of which the driver is not responsible he cannot be held to a standard of conduct which one sitting in the calmness of a courtroom later might determine was the best course.
The ONCA agreed that Franchetto’s initial decision to slow down and head to the paved shoulder to allow the Laguardia vehicle more space to correct its trajectory was entirely reasonable. Franchetto would not have been expected to know that Laguardia was an unconscious driver at the time. Once Franchetto realized that the Laguardia vehicle was headed toward the shoulder, he swerved to the left and braked hard. It was accepted that each of those decisions amounted to a reasonable exercise of split-second driving judgment.
Conclusion
The ONCA confirmed that the motion judge made no palpable and overriding error in granting summary judgment. Franchetto’s actions were not the cause of the Plaintiffs’ injuries. His reaction was appropriate considering the emergency situation that he was forced to respond to despite being given very little time to do so. As the motions judge succinctly put it, Franchetto was simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time”.
This decision is a good reminder that, even when there is conflicting expert evidence, a summary judgment motion may still be the best way to deal with these types of cases. So long as the facts support a finding that a reactive driver exercised reasonable decision-making despite being faced with an emergency situation, there is likely no genuine issue requiring a trial.
See Morales v. Laguardia, 2024 ONCA 869 (CanLII), <https://canlii.ca/t/k85hw>
