From the Archives

The plaintiff, aged 33 years, is an unemployed mill worker living in Prince George. On Friday, 10 March 1990 he was staying with a friend in Vancouver. He went out with his friend early in the evening for Chinese food. He drank two bottles of beer. After returning to his friend’s apartment he left to go out for the evening with another friend, Brian Saarela. They went to a cabaret for an hour or so where the plaintiff said he had one bottle of beer. After waiting in a line-up to get into the Kitsilano Pub, the two friends decided instead to drive to the Pit, a drinking establishment for students at U.B.C. They arrived there shortly after 11 p.m. and stayed for an hour and a half or so. The plaintiff said that while there he drank three or four pints of beer.

The plaintiff had not visited the U.B.C. campus before. He was taken there in Brian Saarela’s truck. Saarela parked his truck in a parking lot at the side of McInnes Field, a large grassed sports field adjacent to the Student Union Building which houses the Pit. The plaintiff and Saarela walked across McInnes Field to get to the Student Union Building. There were portable goals on and around the field (perhaps four in total).

The two friends emerged from the Pit at about 12:30 a.m. and began retracing their steps across McInnes field to get to their vehicle. The two men approached a portable goal which was standing upright on the field. The plaintiff began to walk across the front of the goal. Saarela saw his friend put his right hand on the goal’s left upright post. He saw nothing more until a few seconds later he heard a thump and saw his friend lying face up on the ground with the goal’s crossbar across his chest. Saarela’s attention had been diverted when he was fumbling in his pocket for his watch and then dropped it.

The plaintiff says that he jumped up and grabbed the crossbar with both hands. He was facing along the line of the crossbar. He pulled himself up to the bar and then threw his right leg up and around it. Then says the plaintiff, “I think I felt it let go – something give…it happened so fast, I didn’t have time to do anything…I was on the ground…with the crossbar on my face”.

Brian Saarela assisted the plaintiff back to his truck and drove him to the nearby emergency ward of the U.B.C. Hospital. The plaintiff was found to have suffered severe facial injuries. It was the view of both the emergency ward doctor, and the plastic surgeon intern who saw him later that night at the Vancouver General Hospital, that the plaintiff had been drinking heavily.

The plaintiff says that U.B.C. should not have left a goal upright on McInnes Field at night. I reject the suggestion that the goal as it stood was an allurement or trap to the plaintiff, an adult male, to use as a kind of jungle gym.

Even if it can be said that U.B.C. should have reasonably anticipated that the occasional nighttime visitor, inebriated or not, might try to do chin-ups on an encounter with the portable goal while crossing McInnes Field, that I find is not what happened in this case.

I regret the plaintiff’s serious injury, but must conclude that he was the author of his own misfortune.