MONTREAL – Quebec’s Court docket of Attraction has upheld a 2022 decrease court docket ruling that discovered Canadian Pacific Railway didn’t have authorized legal responsibility for the Lac-Mégantic rail catastrophe that killed 47 folks.
The province’s excessive court docket heard arguments from three joined appeals looking for that the railway firm be required to pay right into a compensation fund for about 4,000 victims of the 2013 tragedy.
Canadian Pacific was the one one in every of 24 firms focused in a class-action lawsuit that refused to voluntarily pay into the sufferer compensation fund, which totalled about $460 million.
In December 2022, Superior Court docket Justice Martin Bureau ruled that Canadian Pacific’s behaviour, whether or not at fault or not, was not the “direct, quick and logical trigger” of the damages suffered by victims.
That duty, the choose dominated, lay with the prepare’s driver — Thomas Harding — and his employer, Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway Restricted.
In a ruling at this time, a three-judge panel from the Court docket of Attraction agreed with that ruling and denied all three appeals.
On July 6, 2013, a runaway prepare hauling tanker automobiles loaded with crude oil broke unfastened and barrelled into the city of 6,000 earlier than derailing and exploding, killing 47 and wiping out a big swath of downtown.
CP mentioned it bore no duty for the catastrophe as a result of the prepare was not operated by CP workers or travelling on CP tracks when it derailed.
The Court docket of Attraction discovered that the appellants didn’t reach demonstrating that the choose made quite a few errors of truth and regulation. The three joined appeals had been introduced forth by a bunch of residents, insurance coverage companies that paid into the compensation fund, and the Quebec authorities.
Function picture: Staff comb by way of particles on Saturday, July 9, 2013 after a prepare derailed inflicting explosions of railway automobiles carrying crude oil in Lac Megantic, Que. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson
