In an Automobile Injury Appeal Commission decision it stated ....
Following a request by the Appellant for help, one injury note reads in part, “… All in all I did not okay any homecare, as it doesn’t sound warranted from our conversation, especially when she has two days off a week, and I’m sure she doesn’t sleep the entire time. Also the fact that she has not received homecare in the past, I did not want to open a can of worms. I’ll leave this to you Darlene to look after.” The Appellant did not receive personal and homecare assistance despite her repeated requests nor does it appear she ever received a written decision why she was denied these benefits at the time.
… For more than 13 years, the Appellant’s requests for home assistance were largely ignored or denied without written reasons. It is difficult to understand what happened in this case. The Appellant suffered a serious head injury and there was much medical and other information that supported her need for assistance.
… While we have the benefit of hind-sight, we are unable to reconcile SGI’s obligation to act with utmost good faith and duty to inform, assist and ensure the Appellant received all of the benefits which she was entitled to with what appears to be a complete failure respecting her need for personal and living assistance despite her requests and documented need. This was not an example of SGI’s “finest hour”.
http://www.prisonexp.org/the-story/
- In my situation with SGI, I feel I am like the prisoners with “no fight” at the end of my appeal or having little choices available to me. I took this off the following website http://www.prisonexp.org/conclusion/
- Close to the end of the Stanford Prison study, some interesting thoughts occurred:
“Several remarkable things occurred during these parole hearings. First, when we asked prisoners whether they would forfeit the money they had earned up to that time if we were to parole them, most said yes. Then, when we ended the hearings by telling prisoners to go back to their cells while we considered their requests, every prisoner obeyed, even though they could have obtained the same result by simply quitting the experiment. Why did they obey? Because they felt powerless to resist. Their sense of reality had shifted, and they no longer perceived their imprisonment as an experiment. In the psychological prison we had created, only the correctional staff had the power to grant paroles.”
- After you have read about the Stanford experiment, imagine the claimants representing themselves at the AIAC are the prisoners in this study, SGI are the guards/correctional staff in this study, while the commission members are the onlookers in this study.
- SGI made an objection to the type of evidence I presented to the AIAC citing it was not acceptable in the court. I could see the commission members may have agreed with my evidence, but the type of evidence I gave was not suitable for court. (However, the judges never said “Overruled” or “Sustained” after SGI’s objection which I think is a violation of court at some level … I watch Law & Order) The commission members then asked if I had any other testimony presenting the similar evidence. I replied, “Let’s just get on with this procedure; I am tired going through this (fight) and I want this over.”
At this point, I similarly felt powerless to resist anything at the tribunal. Did it matter if I opposed anything at the hearing? The laws dictate SGI wins (through restricted payment of expenses if you win your case, the imbalance of legal knowledge between SGIs lawyer and the claimant, the commission members not being able to use all the laws at the AIAC, the commission members not having the ability to transfer the case to a higher court, the design of the disagreement process, etc.)
- In the same way as the prisoners, my sense of reality had shifted, I felt powerless to resist. It did not matter if I were to win that particular argument against SGI, I would end up losing regardless due to the design of the system. Even though the claimant won the case, she still lost monetarily. The costs awarded in her appeal did not cover all her and her parent's expenses because of SGI's mistake. And because SGI has declined to help her after the re-appeal deadline, (before the deadline, SGI stated they were going to help her with the bottleneck during those years of not getting Living Assistance) her parents are forced to pay for the assistance needed to get her bottleneck finished. So essentially her family is paying twice.
- Only SGI, like the guards in the study, had the power to change anything in the claimant's situation. Whatever the claimant present to the commission, nothing would change. SGI would always trump her evidence because of the unequal power distribution within the courtroom and the restriction of laws used at the AIAC. Nevertheless, she would have lost. Going to the AIAC to get a decision changed in her automobile claim for this particular issue was one of the most demoralizing experiences she ever had in her life.
Please click on the page "Lawyers, Judges & Inflation" to find out why the courts are figuring out punitive damages wrong in Canada.
Please note ....
1,2. I got the information about the history of the No-Fault system for this website from the legal document, 'Cash and Crash' written by Kenneth Noble and Reginald Watson. I try my best to put this problem into my own words based on my experience. But when I did quote them verbatim, I gave credit to the article. Most of the information in this website is BASED on my own experience while using their document to confirm my information. Quoting them when I could.
I do not have copyright over the information on this website. But I will maintain copyright over my story. (which probably means nothing by just saying it) Please copy as much as you want and create a new website with this information.
I also talk about penalizing SGI monetarily if they do something wrong and using the money for a judge. I actually thought of a better way to use that money but can not remember at this time. Sorry
I will be attaching all the evidence that I talk about on this website, including emails, changes of adjusters and voice messages. But it will take some time to do this.
If the system is not dramatically changed, you may want to get rid of the AIAC in Saskatchewan.
My latin is not so good. So I mixed up the words Ex Gratia and Ex Parte on this website and ebook. It will take me a while of rechecking it to fix it.
And my grammar, punctuation, and editing are terrible as I am in a time crunch so please do not be too judgemental. I have a lot of dangling and squinting modifiers and split sentences. Use this as information for a claim not as a chance to critique someone’s writing.
Please read Cash and Crash by Kenneth Noble and Reginald Watson. I think you can get it from the Law Society of Saskatchewan Library. This will help you understand the system surrounding Auto Claims in Saskatchewan. I would like to see them on the Gormley Show.
If I forgot to mention Reginald Watson as one of the writers as Cash and Crash, I am sorry. I initially thought it was only written by one lawyer.