Q: What if someone drinks at my house, then leaves, gets into an accident and hurts someone... are we in trouble? Can the injured person sue me or get my home insurance involved.
A: It depends. The Supreme Court has held that a social host does not owe a duty of care to a person injured by a guest who has consumed alcohol. There is no duty of care between the injured person and you “as the social host”. There would obviously be a lawsuit between the injured party and the drunk driver. There “may” be liability imposed on you if the facts were disastrously stacked against you – i.e. you served all the alcohol, you monitored what the person drank and you evidently let that person drive knowing full well that they were impaired.
To be more clear, this is called “social host liability”. The Supreme Court of Canada decided on the topic of social host liability in 2006. The Court held that a social host does not owe a duty of care to a person injured by a guest who has been drinking.
In that case, Julie Zimmerman and Dwight Courrier hosted a New Year's pot-luck dinner to which guests were to bring their own alcohol. Desmond Desormeaux, a guest at the party and long-time heavy drinker, drank approximately 12 beers over 2 and a half hours that evening.
According to the version of events accepted by both sides, the hosts did not monitor his drinking more closely than the drinking of the other guests. Desormeaux drove home after a brief conversation with Courrier, who asked him, “if he was allright”. On the way home, Desormeaux was involved in a bad accident with another car, paralyzing the passenger Zoë Childs and killing another passenger, Derek Dupre.
The difficulty in this case was that finding liability in this case would mean recognizing a new duty of care. Regardless, and oddly, all three Courts decided this case with different reasons.
The Trial Court
The trial judge at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice found that the injury to Childs was reasonably foreseeable, that is, a reasonable person in the position of Mr. Courrier and Ms. Zimmerman would have foreseen that Mr. Desormeaux might cause an accident and injure someone else—but refused to impose a duty of care based on public policy grounds.
The Court of Appeal
Like the trial court, the Court of Appeal for Ontario held that Zimmerman and Courrier did not owe a duty of care to Childs, but for different reasons: the relationship between the hosts and the guest was not proximate enough to ground a duty of care. This was because, among other things, the hosts did not serve alcohol to Desormeaux and did not know he was intoxicated, they did not assume control over the service of alcohol, there was no statute imposing a duty to monitor drinking on social hosts, and the hosts did not otherwise assume responsibility for Desormeaux's safety.
The Supreme Court
The Supreme Court held that a duty of care did not exist between the social hosts (Courrier and Zimmerman) and the third-party users of the road (Childs) injured by Desormeaux. Like the Ontario Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court found that the proximity between the plaintiffs and defendants was not sufficient to ground a duty of care. Unlike the Ontario court, however, the Supreme Court did not even discuss the second stage of the Anns/Kamloops Test, writing simply that since sufficient proximity was not present in the relationship between the parties, it was not necessary to discuss the second stage.
Be careful. Don't overserve, and if you do, do everything in your power to ensure that person does not drive. Although Canada's top Court says no liaiblity - with different facts you may sway the Court in finding liability against you.
Matt Lalande
Read the case here: http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2006/2006scc18/2006scc18.html