Great moments from Quebec small claims court

   It might soon become more difficult to sue someone in Quebec.
   A civil law overhaul made in Feb. 2014 was noted in some media mainly for raising the maximum allowable total to seek in a small claims court suit from $7,000 to $15,000.
  That reform also came with other new wrinkles which are only broadly laid out by the Justice Ministry but apparently certain parts of it will only be implemented in the upcoming months, resulting in it becoming more complicated to lay a lawsuit over $15,000.
    But what about the famous $15,000 total? Has anybody grabbed the ring yet and been awarded that sum?
   Quebec small claims courts hear about 500 cases per month so it'd take a long time to go through all of them
   A quick peek at about 300 cases from September shows that very few have asked for the big $15,000 total.
  Hidden defect complaints tend to dominate such courtrooms, but other vehicle deals gone bad, home repairs gone wrong and consumer complaints, including many against holiday providers jam the dockets. Many plaintiffs simply get awarded zilch and end up $140 out of pocket.
   The only winner of $15,000 that jumped out from the September files is someone named Vartan Mirzakhanyan who sued Yves Dagenais in Laval for the $15,000. Judge Lyne Foucault awarded Mirzakhanyan the entire sum.
   It didn't hurt that the defendant Dagenais didn't even show up for the proceedings. The judge noted that the plaintiff seemed to have a well-founded case, the nature of which was not revealed in the online court document.

  Here are some other notable small claims court judgments from September:

    Kayla Branco finally got her day in court seven years after slipping on a soccer field while playing for Laurier MacDonald High. It was a cold day, 2 degrees Celcius but the teams played nonetheless and the field may or may not have been dangerously hard or icy or something.
   Branco slipped - nobody pushed or tripped her - and suffered an injury which she said required three surgeries.

Kayla Branco, left, was denied her injury claim

   So she sued her high school, the school board,  the Greater Montreal Athletic Association and the School Tax Collection Committee for $7,000.
   Judge Coutlee said that the plaintiff must prove that the defendant committed a direct fault and there muste be a direct and causal link between the error and the damage suffered.  So Branco won zero.
   (This is no shocker, we saw previously that a badminton player got no compensation after losing an eye on a court in a school in Lachine.)


   Jacques Doucet, a 73-year-old wheelchair-bound resident of Three Rivers, had a 13-year-old Huskie who he left in the care of a friend while in hospital in April 2013. The friend left the dog in a car one day and it started barking incessantly and loudly.  Cops tried to reach the guy put in charge of the dog as well as Doucet but could not reach either and the SPCA came and fetched the dog - who was aggressive towards them - and brought it in while. After five days - as it policy apparently- the SPCA put the dog down as is their policy. It had been deemed too old for adoption. So Doucet got out of the hospital to find that his dog was dead.He sued the SPCA and and the municipality for $10,000 but the judge gave him zero.


 A situation involving a star football player and a star basketball player, both aged about 15, in Drummondville ended up at small claims court.    Tristan Marchand-Lamothe pushed William Boyer Richard against the wall of a bathroom at their high school on May 9, 2013 according to testimony and gave him a beat-down that led to a cut and concussion
   The victim and his mom sued the agressor and his parents for $15,000 and a judge last month sided with them to the tune of $4,500. (In a similar situation Sebastien Turmel was ordered to pay over $5,000 to Sylvie Labarre and Bernard Hirsch following a dispute over the placement of a noisy generator in good old Ste. Marthe sur le Lac on July 20, 2013.)