A trial judge was wrong to find a City guilty of Occupational Health and Safety Act charges solely because an accident had occurred in which a worker died. The trial court should have gone further and analyzed each charge.
The charges were filed against the City of St. John’s after a tragic accident on a road construction site that resulted in one worker dying after being hit by a car. There were seven charges against the City including failure to provide adequate training and failure to maintain adequate traffic control.
The trial judge had held that the mere fact of the car striking the employee was proof of the actus reus of the charges. The appeal court decided that that was wrong: the trial judge should have analyzed each charge to determine whether the prosecutor had called evidence to prove each element of the offence. The trial judge had wrongly focused on the consequences of the alleged breach of the OHSA (the accident and the worker’s death) rather than on “the identification and proof of the actual elements of each offence”.
This decision is a welcome reminder that occupational health and safety prosecutors cannot simply rely, in seeking to obtain a conviction on OHSA charges, on the fact that an accident took place. Instead, they must do the work of proving each charge.
R. v St. John’s (City), 2017 NLCA 71 (CanLII)
