St. Joseph's Care Group drops a lawsuit for the Loch -Hoch complaint in favor of the class action lawsuit

Thunder Bay – The St. Joseph's Care Group has tacitly put up with its own lawsuit against the city of Thunder Bay because of Lochleck's in copper water pipes.

Instead, SJCG is now based on the result of the class action against the city on behalf of thousands of potential applicants who were certified two years ago.

The St. Joseph's Care Group originally searched for damages of 350,000 US dollars after LECKS occurred in dozens of units in the PR Koch apartment complex in St. Joseph's Heritage.

SJCG claimed that sodium hydroxide in the city's water supply in 2018 was the source of the problem, and the city had been negligent to examine the potential for damage both before and after using the chemical.

In a declaration of defense, the city contested negligence and argued that the pipes in PRKOH apartments were already beyond their life expectancy and they should have been replaced earlier.

SJCG's claim for damage was later reduced to 205,000 US dollars, and she continued to pursue his lawsuit independently, even after it became known until March 2021 that a class action law was on the move.

But it is now indicated that in March 2024 – eight months after the class action was certified in court – the St. Joseph's Care Group changed the direction and decided to rely on the result of the class from which she had never decided.

In an affidavit that was submitted to the Superior Court of Justice at the beginning of this year, SJCG first said that it should sue the city itself because the small size of his claim would accelerate the case.

But it started to see things differently because delays in solving the matter, increasing costs and the “stressful” volume of the documents opened by the city.

“We had not expected that our claim would be treated as if it were a procedure of 350 million US dollars … SJCG is not interested in paying a claim worth 205,000 US dollars, since this would be a claim for $ 350 million. “SJCG decides to deny his claim through the class procedure, as this is simply a more cost -effective approach under the circumstances.”

City wanted compensation for “throwing costs away” in the abandoned case of St. Joseph's Care Group

The city replied by applying for an application to the court to reimburse it for almost 63,000 US dollars for “thrown away costs”.

Justice Robin Lere, who heard the application in front of the Supreme Court in Thunder Bay, filed the application.

The city requested a reimbursement of almost 40,000 US dollars for the costs related to the development of a shorter list of documents relevant for the complaint of SCCG and a further 23,000 US dollars in connection with the rejection of a planned examination for discovery -a process in which one party can be provided according to the proof of the proof submitted, including another, including another presented evidence that an attempt is presented begins with the experiment.

Judge Lere refused to award the costs for the preparation of the document list and said the city had not managed to provide cost accounting to support the applicable amount and did not explain why the process lasted 118 hours.

She also noticed that it was a judge, not SJCG who had asked the city to provide the new document list, and that this was an exercise that should have been done at the beginning.

Finally, the judge found that, since the city had submitted the same documents in the class action, the review, in which thousands of irrelevant documents were removed in the case of St. Joseph, could not be regarded as a “waste of time”.

With regard to the city's cost claim for the discovery, which was ultimately canceled for the examination of November 2023, she said that SJCG announced the city in October that the meeting may not be continued.

Judge Leper also found that the city had not managed to confirm the costs of confirming the hours for the preparation of the witnesses for the meeting and could not explain why the preparation of the witness, despite an e -mail from St. Joseph Care Group, which indicated that no court reporter would be available.

In addition, she explained that some (if not all) were not necessarily a waste of time the work that prepares a witness to examinations in the discovery.

“The preparation for the exams in the class action will probably be shorter due to this previous preparation,” the judge wrote in a decision published in the last month.

A date for the negotiation of the class action has not yet been announced.

In February of this year, the city of Thunder Bay received 50,000 US dollars for its expense at a hearing from the Court of Appeal in Ontario, in which the decision of a judge to strike part of the claim for collecting.