When you are injured on someone else’s property in BC, the person most directly responsible for your harm is not always the one who ends up bearing legal responsibility for it. In many dangerous premises cases, it is the person or business behind that individual who is ultimately liable for your injuries and losses. This comes up most often in commercial settings, but it can apply anywhere a property owner has hired someone to work on their behalf.
Individual employees and contractors rarely have the assets or insurance coverage to fully compensate someone for a serious injury. Rather, the person or business that hired them often does. It’s important for those injured on dangerous premises to understand who could be held liable for their injuries, as it directly affects their ability to recover fair compensation.
What Is Vicarious Liability?
Vicarious liability holds one party responsible for another party’s wrongful act based on the nature of the relationship between them, rather than any direct fault of their own. In dangerous premises cases, this commonly happens with an employer being held legally responsible for harm caused by an employee while the employee performed their job.
Vicarious liability applies even when the employer had no direct involvement in the action or inaction that caused the accident, and by extension, the injury. The law takes the position that businesses and property owners benefit from the work performed on their behalf, and that they must also carry the legal risk when that work causes injury to others.
However, if an employee was acting entirely outside the scope of their job and purely in their own personal interest, the employer is generally not liable. An employee who causes an accident while using a company vehicle for a personal errand, without the employer’s knowledge or authorisation, is unlikely to garner vicarious negligence for that employer.
Direct Liability vs. Vicarious Liability
Direct and vicarious liability have subtle differences. Direct liability means that the party responsible for the wrongful conduct is the same party being held accountable for it. For example, this might include a landlord who ignores repeated concerns about a loose stairwell railing. If someone is eventually injured because this issue was left unaddressed, the landlord is directly liable for failing to repair the railing.
With vicarious liability, a business, employer, or landlord may not have done anything wrong themselves, but the law still holds them responsible because of their relationship to the person who did cause the harm. In this case, take a contractor who leaves an unsecured hazard on a commercial property and injures a visitor. The contractor acted wrongfully, but it is the property owner or business that hired them who bears legal responsibility for that conduct.
In some cases, both doctrines apply. For instance, a business owner who fails to put any training protocols in place may be directly liable for that failure, while also being vicariously liable for the harm their untrained employee goes on to cause.
Elements of Vicarious Liability
Two key elements must be present for vicarious liability to apply. First, the relationship between the person who caused the harm and the person or business being held responsible must be sufficiently close. As mentioned, this is typically an employer-employee relationship. Second, the wrongful act must be sufficiently connected to that relationship; the harm caused must have occurred within the scope of the employment, meaning it must have arisen out of the work the person was hired to do.
Qualifying Relationships Under Vicarious Liability
Though the employer-employee relationship is the most common, vicarious liability can also arise in principal-agent relationships and in contractor-subcontractor arrangements. When a contractor is hired by a property owner to complete a project and outsources that work to a subcontractor, the contractor remains obligated to ensure the work is carried out correctly and safely. If the subcontractor causes harm, liability can travel up the chain.
As a general rule, a business or property owner is not vicariously liable for the negligence of an independent contractor. However, there are exceptions. If a worker is fully integrated into the day-to-day operations of a business, the relationship may be treated as employment regardless of how it is labelled on paper. Similarly, if the hiring party controls how, when, and where the work is performed, courts may reach the same conclusion.
Beyond that, certain duties are considered so fundamental to public safety that a business cannot legally transfer responsibility for them to a third party. A property owner who hires someone to address a safety issue on their premises, for example, cannot use that arrangement to escape liability if the work is done negligently. The same applies where contracted work carries an obvious and severe risk to others, such as handling hazardous chemicals or large-scale excavations. In those circumstances, the law does not allow the hiring party to contract away the risk.
Scope of Employment and Vicarious Liability
Whatever the wrongful action or inaction was, it must have been sufficiently connected to the nature of the employment itself. If an employee causes harm while carrying out a task their employer authorised, that task occurred within the scope of employment and the employer would likely be deemed liable.
Things become more complex when the employee does something they were not supposed to do. In those cases, vicarious liability can still apply, but only if the wrongful act was closely connected to what the employee was actually hired to do. Then, the courts ask whether the employee was doing their job badly or doing something entirely unrelated to their job.
Say a security guard is hired to monitor access to a nightclub and manage disruptive patrons. While removing a patron from the premises, the security guard assaults the individual and causes them injury. Assaulting someone is not an authorised duty, but because the assault happened while removing the patron, which is authorised by the nightclub ownership, the security guard’s actions are an improper way of conducting an authorised act.
Importantly, if an employee fails to follow workplace rules or procedures, the employer is not protected from liability. What matters is the connection between the wrongful act and the employment, not whether the employee behaved as they were told. The employer also does not need to have anticipated the specific wrong that occurred.
How Stephens & Holman Can Help
If you were injured on someone else’s property in BC, determining who is legally responsible for your injuries is not always straightforward. Vicarious liability claims involve identifying the right parties, establishing the nature of the relationship between them, and connecting the wrongful act to the scope of that relationship. Stephens & Holman represents injured people across BC, and we can help you understand the full picture of who may be liable for your injuries, including parties you may not have considered. Contact our offices today to schedule a free consultation.