Background
Sutton Farms operates a family farm near Napanee, Ontario, with fields on both sides of the Napanee River connected by a private bridge reconstructed in 1980. The bridge was sixteen feet wide, but only the centre ten feet rested on steel support beams — the outer three feet on each side were wooden deck with no structural support underneath. Neither the farm owners nor any signage disclosed this hidden structural feature to contractors who used the bridge.
T.C.O. Agromart had provided crop-spraying services to the farm for approximately twenty years. In the relevant season, Agromart’s employee, Mr. Denyes, drove a crop sprayer across the bridge. The right front wheel drifted onto the unsupported overhang, the deck gave way, and the sprayer fell into the river. The driver escaped without serious injury, but the sprayer was severely damaged. Agromart’s insurer brought a subrogated action against Sutton Farms alleging negligence and breach of s. 3(1) of Ontario’s Occupiers’ Liability Act (OLA).
At trial, Justice Jensen dismissed the action. She found the driver’s inadvertent drift to the right was the operative cause of the accident and that, because Mr. Denyes already knew to keep centred on the bridge, a warning to that effect would not have prevented the collapse. She further held the accident was not reasonably foreseeable given the bridge’s long history of uneventful heavy use. Agromart appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeal (Osborne J.A., Gillese and Coroza JJ.A. concurring) allowed the appeal and set aside the dismissal, awarding Agromart $423,016.15 in damages plus $25,000 in appeal costs. The court held that the trial judge committed two related errors. First, she conflated causation with the standard of care: by asking only whether a warning to “stay centred” would have changed Mr. Denyes’s behaviour, she effectively used the conduct of one injured party to define the occupier’s general duty to all users, rather than independently assessing what the standard of care required. Second, she defined the duty to warn too narrowly. Because the structural weakness was a hidden danger — unlike the obvious dangers at issue in the cases she relied upon — the duty to warn necessarily encompassed disclosure of the unsupported overhang itself, not merely a reminder to drive in the centre.
On causation, the court found both factual and legal causation established. Had Mr. Denyes known that the outer three feet on each side were entirely unsupported, that information would have materially affected his decision to cross with the sprayer, satisfying the “but for” test. On legal causation, the trial judge’s foreseeability finding was a palpable and overriding error: the farm owner Mr. Sutton himself knew of the hazard, personally ensured his family’s equipment stayed on the beams, refused to take wide equipment across, and routinely used an alternative bridge for machinery with a wider wheelbase. That evidence demonstrated the risk was not merely possible but was actually foreseen by the very party who owed the duty of care.
The court confirmed that Sutton Farms, as occupier, breached s. 3(1) of the OLA by failing to warn the appellant and its employees of the hidden structural deficiency, that the breach was both a factual and legal cause of the accident, and that the pleadings adequately raised the duty-to-warn issue throughout the litigation.
Key Takeaways
- A standard of care analysis under the OLA must be conducted independently of causation; using one plaintiff’s actual knowledge as a proxy for the occupier’s general duty to all users is a reviewable legal error.
- Where a danger is hidden rather than plain and obvious, the duty to warn extends to disclosing the specific hidden hazard — not merely reminding users of precautions they already know in the abstract.
- An occupier’s own precautionary conduct (here, using an alternate bridge for wide equipment) is cogent evidence that the risk was reasonably foreseeable, and may defeat a foreseeability defence even where no prior accidents had occurred.
- The absence of prior incidents over a long period of use does not negate foreseeability when the inherent risk of the condition remains present.
Why It Matters
This decision clarifies the analytical sequence courts must follow in occupiers’ liability claims: standard of care must be assessed on its own terms before turning to causation, and the scope of a duty to warn is calibrated to whether the danger is latent or obvious. Farm operators, property owners, and their insurers should note that private infrastructure with non-obvious structural limitations — bridges, platforms, loading docks — may require affirmative disclosure to contractors and other lawful users, particularly where the owner’s own practices already reflect awareness of the risk.
The case also reinforces that a defendant’s subjective foresight of a risk (demonstrated through their own safety precautions) can establish the objective foreseeability element of negligence, even when no comparable accident had previously occurred on the premises. Businesses that routinely invite contractors onto specialized or aging infrastructure should review whether known structural limitations have been adequately communicated to all foreseeable users.