Walking in Waterloo Region

[ijmorlan]

Here is an article that explains a bit about when municipalities in Ontario are in practice found liable. It includes some scenarios from a case in Cambridge.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/n...-1.3108350 about the case I was thinking of about the damaged sidewalk in Hamilton. I think the details are interesting. The victim's negligence was found to contribute to the incident, but the case rested on the fact that the City did not take every reasonable effort to maintain the sidewalk, and did not follow its own policies.

Sorry, I know that's not about snow, but it came to mind as illustrative of how these cases are actually decided. The actual rulings can be interesting- they are highly situational, and victims are asked questions about how often they traverse a specific stretch of sidewalk, how aware they were of their surroundings and conditions that day, whether they may have been distracted, in addition to questions about City policies and how well they were adhered to.

What bugs me about this, is that it seems to require a specific harmful event (someone falling).  The thousands of people who simply cannot leave their home in the winter because sidewalks are never cleared probably can't sue.  Litigation is a pitiful substitute for legislation.

Or just doing the right thing without being forced.

I wonder though if an AODA complaint couldn’t be made. To me it is absolutely unacceptable that sidewalks are effectively unusable by many with reduced mobility. I don’t expect perfect equality between people of different levels of mobility — the fact that snow and ice are disproportionately a problem for those with less mobility is a fact of physics, not human-created discrimination — but better snow clearing would be a big benefit for everybody and even more so for those with reduced mobility.