Class Action Finder » Canadian Class Actions

New Brunswick class action against province’s health authority

yuming — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:38:09 +0000

Last week, a class action lawsuit was launched against New Brunswick’s Regional Health Authority for faulty pathology work at the Miramichi Regional Hospital.

The complaint alleges that the hospital authority was negligent when it hired pathologist Dr. Rajgopal Menon in 1994 against the advice of Dr. John MacKay, its vice-president of medical services at the time.

It also claims that inadequate background checks were done and the authority ignored warnings made by Menon’s previous employer, the Saint John Hospital.

The class action represents 50 patients who were treated by Menon, between 2004 and 2005, and seeks damages on behalf of all of them.

Menon oversaw diagnostic testing of 24,000 pathology samples from 1995 to 2007.

The health authority is also charged with not reacting quickly enough in dealing with possible inaccuracies in Menon’s work.

An independent audit made late last year reflected discrepancies in 18 per cent of 227 prostate and breast cancer cases under Menon’s care in 2004 and 2005. Of these cases, six per cent were misdiagnosed.

In 41 cases, there was either misdiagnosis of the stage of cancer, or there was an incomplete protocol, or examination, while the other nine patients had undetected cancers leading to misdiagnoses, according to the claim.

Canadian couple files class action over gambling

yuming — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 06:29:14 +0000

A Markham couple, Peter Dennis, 49, and his wife, Zubin Noble, 61, has filed a $3.5 billion class-action lawsuit against Ontario’s gaming agency on behalf of gamblers who complained they requested to be refused entrance from casinos but were still let in.

The suit charges that the class members are compulsive gamblers and their addiction “disrupts, compromises and ultimately destroys the lives of individual problem gamblers by causing a range of harms for them and their family members including emotional, social, financial, legal, employment, educational and health-related harms”. None of these claims have been proven in court as yet.

In the accusations, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation did not implement proper controls to make sure that its voluntary self-exclusion policy was carried out effectively.

The couple’s lawyer, Jerome Morse of Adair Morse LLP in Toronto, said the class action suit is meant to help addicted gamblers who have lost huge amounts of money and affected family members. There is hope that the suit would bring landmark revisions to casinos across Canada.

In the self-exclusion policy, gamblers are photographed and their personal information is registered and stored in binders at casinos. If they are nabbed trying to steal into a casino, they can be arrested for trespassing.

Apparently, only this memory-based enforcement was used and therefore failed terribly as a system.

Although the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation has expressed that it is up to individuals to enter casino premises on their own accord, but it has also said it might consider using face recognition technology to make their system more foolhardy.

Ontario has been hit with nine individual lawsuits related to gambling self-exclusion but it is the first time it has a class action lawsuit filed against it.

Canadian class action lawsuits

yuming — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 06:27:27 +0000

As Class Action Finder has been growing in these past two years, we have decided to report on Canadian class action lawsuits, as more and more attention is given to such legal issues up North and there is a higher demand for related facts and figures.

Look out for such posts and thank you for your ongoing support.