A group of MBA students at the University of British Columbia have launched an appeal from a British Columbia Supreme Court decision dismissing their claims against the University. A Notice of Appeal was filed in the Court of Appeal on November 8, 2004.

The students received letters offering them places in the University’s MBA program for a tuition fee of $7,000. The letters said that “fees for the year are subject to adjustment and the University reserves the right to change fees without notice”. Later, after students had accepted their offers of admission and paid their deposits, the University’s Board of Governors set their fees at $28,000, four times the amount the students had thought they had agreed to pay.

One of the students learned of the fee increase while attending his opening week of classes in the fall and commenced a lawsuit for breach of contract. His claims and those of his fellow students were dismissed by Madam Justice M.E. Boyd on October 8, 2004. The judge rejected the students’ claims that the University was liable for breach of contract or misrepresentation.

Read the decision under appeal

The Office of the Police Complaint Commission has determined the complaint of Thomas Evon Stevenson’s family to be unsubstantiated, after reviewing a secret report prepared by the Chief Constable of the Nelson Police Department.

Stevenson was killed in December, 2002 when Vancouver Police Department Sgt. Milligan fired three bullets into his chest as Stevenson sat in a stolen vehicle that had earlier been disabled and staked out by police. Milligan was standing in front of the car and said he fired after he saw Stevenson reach for a gun within the darkened vehicle. VPD investigators later found a toy plastic gun lying by the left rear wheel of the vehicle. Stevenson’s fingerprints were not found on the toy pistol.

In January of 2004, a Coroner’s jury determined the death was a homicide and recommended that police not investigate themselves and that video cameras be installed in police cars. To date, neither of these recommendations have been implemented.

The Nelson police chief was called in to perform an external investigation and he apparently produced a three part report. The Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner has refused to let the Stevenson family or its lawyers see the report, but it has confirmed that no investigator performed a reconstruction of the incident scene to determine whether Sgt. Milligan’s statements that he saw a gun before he fired were plausible.

The family’s wrongful death lawsuit continues.

Although the 2010 Olympic Winter Games are over five years away, a traditional Olympic activity has already started in earnest, with the news that VANOC and its lawyers are hunting down unsuspecting small business owners and serving demand letters on them “to protect the Olympic brand”.

A Greek restaurant on Vancouver’s Denman Street and a Squamish home builder have already been targeted, and more local businesses are sure to be on the hit list. Such heavy-handed measures are necessary, say the organizers, to avoid a financial deficit in staging the games.

Oh, I get it. When BC taxpayers face the inevitable multimillion dollar cost overruns inherent in staging such an extravagant two-week circus, we are all to blame a West End pizzeria for the red ink.

The following are among the words, phrases and things that cannot be used without express permission:

Olympics, Olympiad, Olympian, The Olympic Rings, The Olympic Torch, The Olympic Flame, The Olympic Motto (citius, altius, fortius), 2010, Vancouver 2010, Canada 2010, Whistler 2010, Vancouver Whistler 2010, 2010 Games, Team Canada 2010, Winter Games, Countdown to 2010, Sea to Sky Games, Spirit of 2010 and Vancouver ’10.

We have served the materials in support of our application to certify the case as a class action. The Honourable Mr. Justice Romilly has been appointed as the Case Management judge and December 10, 2004 has been reserved for the lawyers’ first appearance before the Court. We anticipate that further scheduling issues will be discussed at that time, including the timing and length of the application for certification.

Please watch this site for further updates.

After a week of dramatic testimony, the four-man, one-woman jury at the coroner’s inquest into the deaths of Sherry Heron, Anna Adams and Bryan Heron delivered its findings and recommendations.

The jury found that Sherry Heron and Anna Adams were the victims of homicide, while Bryan Heron’s death was “undetermined”. Seven recommendations for procedural improvement were directed to the RCMP and to the Mission Memorial Hospital.

Coroner Marj Paonessa and the jury had earlier heard that Senior Correctional Officer Bryan Heron received a restraining order at 3:33 p.m. on May 20, 2003, left work and went to Mission Memorial Hospital, where he walked in to his wife’s hospital room and fatally shot her and her mother. The hospital staff had received a copy of the restraining order, but took no steps to keep Heron away or hide his wife from him. Bryan Heron died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the bush on May 23, 2003 as police closed in.

A week earlier (May 13, 2003), Sherry Heron’s sister, brother and brother-in-law had gone to the Mission RCMP and reported incidents of domestic violence and threats by Bryan Heron against his hospitalized spouse. RCMP Cst. Mike Pfeifer interviewed a frightened and upset Sherry Heron that day, who confirmed the threats and said she feared for her and her family’s safety. Cst. Pfeifer spoke to his own father, a corrections colleague of Byan Heron’s, and was told Heron was a “good person”. Cst. Pfeifer did not investigate the matter further.

The incident was remarkably similar to a tragedy in Veron seven years earlier, where an estranged husband killed nine members of his family before taking his own life. That incident also resulted in a coroner’s inquest. At the time, a headline in The Province newspaper read, “RCMP ignored death threats”. The article continued, “The Mounties ignored a woman’s complaint that her estranged husband had threatened to kill her and her family, an inquest into their deaths heard yesterday.”