Dziwenka et al. v. R. et al., [1972] SCR 419

Supreme Court of Canada

Dziwenka et al. v. R. et al., [1972] S.C.R. 419

Date: 1971-10-05

Marvin Marshall Dziwenka, an infant by his next friend, Eva Dziwenka, and Eva Dziwenka (Plaintiffs) Appellants;

and

Her Majesty The Queen in right of Alberta, and M.W. Mapplebeck (Defendants) Respondents;

and

J.E. Harold Ratai and Dr. Frank Hall (Defendants).

1971: June 9; 1971: October 5.

Present: Martland, Ritchie, Hall, Spence and Laskin JJ.

ON APPEAL FROM THE SUPREME COURT OF ALBERTA, APPELLATE DIVISION

Negligence—Student’s hand injured on coming into contact with unguarded blade of power‑saw—Student a deaf mute—Directed by instructor to perform trimming operation—Instructor moving to another work bench—Student’s momentary inattention—Instructor’s duty of care.

The plaintiff, an 18-year-old deaf mute, was a student at the Alberta School for the Deaf, where he suffered a serious injury to his left hand when it came into contact with the unguarded blade of a circular power table saw which he was operating at the time. He had been constructing a six-drawer chest under the supervision of the manual arts instructor, the defendant M, and, owing to an error in measurement, the drawers, when assembled, were too deep. The plaintiff was directed to trim two edges of each drawer and it was during this operation that the accident happened.

Although he had used the power table saw over the previous two or three years, the occasion of the injury was the first upon which he had been directed to trim chest drawers. Such an operation was not a usual one, and it involved prior removal of the safety guard and associated safety elements. The removal was effected by M and the plaintiff, and the former then demonstrated one or two cuts and watched the plaintiff do one or two. Another student was directed to assist the plaintiff by handing him the drawers for each cut and receiving the work after each sawing operation. There were six other

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students in the shop and they were engaged on projects for which they used hand tools. Turning his attention to some of these other students, M moved to a work bench 15 to 25 feet away and from there glanced occasionally towards the plaintiff. The sound of the saw indicated normal operation but after about ten minutes the sound changed and M saw that the plaintiff had been injured.

The trial judge found negligence on M’s part in failing to give adequate supervision of work which was dangerous. But because the plaintiff’s attention drifted momentarily and his hand then struck the saw, he found contributory negligence on the plaintiff’s part and fixed his degree of fault at 40 per cent. The Appellate Division found no negligence on M’s part and dismissed the action. An appeal was then brought to this Court.

Held (Martland and Ritchie JJ. dissenting): The appeal should be allowed and the judgment at trial restored.

Per Hall, Spence and Laskin JJ.: The question of M’s negligence was not foreclosed by evidence of the plaintiff’s awareness of the danger in the operations to which he was assigned. Nor could his momentary inattention provide complete exoneration of the defendants if there was a breach by M of his duty of care to the plaintiff. The Appellate Division took too limited a view of that duty in its conclusion that M’s conduct in moving away from close proximity to the work did not amount to a failure to take normal and proper precautions against injury to the plaintiff.

The duty of care owing to a student, especially a handicapped one, in respect of his personal safety while operating dangerous machinery, was even a stricter one than that owed by an employer to an employee working with dangerous machinery. There was a high degree of risk of injury and either one of two courses could reasonably and easily have been followed by M. He could have had the drawers disassembled, in which case the error was correctable by using the power-saw with the guard attached; or, he could have stayed with the plaintiff until the job was done with the unguarded saw. It was not improbable that the accident would not have happened if M had directly supervised the operations until they were finished.

Per Martland and Ritchie JJ., dissenting: The proper inference to be drawn from the evidence as

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a whole was that the accident was caused by momentary inattention on the part of the plaintiff. Such momentary inattention could not be the subject of warning of any kind, and as the additional duty resting on a schoolmaster towards students who are deaf and dumb was based on his inability “to warn them rapidly of what may be going wrong”, it followed that where nothing was “going wrong” against which such a warning could be given, there could be no breach of that duty.

APPEAL from a judgment of the Supreme Court of Alberta, Appellate Division[1], allowing an appeal from a judgment of Milvain C.J.T.D. Appeal allowed and judgment at trial restored.

V. Moshansky and W. Stevenson, for the plaintiffs, appellants.

H.L. Irving, Q.C., for the defendant, respondent, Her Majesty The Queen in right of Alberta.

W.F. McLean, for the defendant, respondent, M.W. Mapplebeck.

The judgment of Martland and Ritchie JJ. was delivered by

RITCHIE J. (dissenting)—This is an appeal from a judgment of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of Alberta allowing an appeal from the judgment rendered at trial before Chief Justice Milvain who had held the present appellant to be 40 per cent at fault and the respondent 60 per cent at fault in respect of an accident which occurred when the appellant, who was a young deaf mute, injured his left hand while operating a circular saw at the Alberta School for the Deaf where he was attending a class in woodworking under the instruction of the respondent, Mapplebeck. In setting aside this judgment, Mr. Justice Allen, whose reasons for judgment were adopted by the other members of the Appellate Division, concluded that the appellant’s “momentary inattention was ‘the sole author of his injury’” and that his action should accordingly be dismissed.

The circumstances giving rise to this litigation have been fully outlined in the reasons for judg-

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ment in the Courts below and it will be seen that the findings of fact made by the learned trial judge have been adopted by the Appellate Division so that the essential difference between the reasons for judgment of Chief Justice Milvain and those of Mr. Justice Allen lies in the inferences to be drawn from facts which are not in dispute. I agree with Mr. Justice Allen that on the basis of the authorities cited by him and many other authorities, it is well established that an appellate court is in as good a position as a trial judge to draw the proper inferences from primary facts.

On November 30, 1961, when the accident occurred, the appellant was 18 years of age and had been a student at the Alberta School for the Deaf for five years. Although he had been a deaf mute since birth, the appellant was very intelligent and a competent woodworker who had been trained in the use of the power tools at the school before the respondent Mapplebeck came there as a teacher in November, 1960, so that his former teacher was able to say that, when he left in June of 1960, the appellant was already:

…very competent. He was quite skilled. For a boy of his age I would say he was quite an accomplished operator of power tools.

Notwithstanding this previous training, it appears that in November 1960 when Mapplebeck was appointed by the provincial government as the instructor in industrial arts at the school, he began instructing all the students afresh in the use of each of the tools. As to this, Mapplebeck said of the appellant:

Even when I came Marvin had received a wealth of information from the records that I saw, and I gave him thorough instruction myself of, as I gave all the boys on demonstrations, theory lessons, I could note that he was very capable, he was careful, he was experienced in using the power tools. I would say he was far from a novice, quite experienced.

On the day of the accident the appellant had been engaged in a project of constructing a chest of drawers and when it was found that the drawers, which had already been cut and glued, were slightly too deep for the frame, it appeared that

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the mistake could best be remedied by using the power saw which could only be effectively employed for this purpose after removing the safety guard with which it was normally covered. This operation involved the potential danger incidental to the use of the hands in close proximity to the exposed mechanically operated cutting edge of a revolving blade, but it appears that the appellant had had previous experience in the use of the unguarded saw and the learned trial judge observed in this regard:

He has had experience with all the forms of power equipment that were in the shop or laboratory at the school. I am sure that he too was aware of the dangers involved in using a saw with a safety guard off. This particular operation required it to be off, the job couldn’t be done otherwise and I am sure that he too was aware of the dangers that were involved in those circumstances.

When Mapplebeck was alerted to the appellant’s needs, he appears to have left the rest of the class, which consisted of a total of eight boys, and devoted himself to helping to remove the safety guard from the saw and to demonstrating, with one of the drawers, exactly how the cuts should be made. He stayed beside the appellant and watched him make one or two cuts satisfactorily and he called over one of his other pupils named Turner, who was allotted the task of standing at the other side of the saw from the appellant to receive the drawers after each cut had been made and then to pass them back to the appellant.

Having satisfied himself that the task was being properly carried out, Mapplebeck turned his attention to some of his other pupils and moved between 15 and 25 feet away from the saw in order to supervise the work that they were doing. From this latter position Mapplebeck could, of course, hear the saw operating and he turned, from time to time, to watch the appellant and Turner at work. The saw appeared to be working well and the work proceeding satisfactorily until Mapplebeck suddenly heard a change in the sound coming from the revolving blade which indicated that it was cutting through something softer than wood and when he turned to look the appellant was standing back from the saw with his left hand raised to about shoulder level and obviously in-

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jured. The injuries were serious and ultimately involved the loss of two fingers, but this appeal is exclusively concerned with liability and the extent of the damages need not be discussed.

In holding that Mapplebeck, and the Province of Alberta which employed him, were 60 per cent at fault for the accident, the learned trial judge proceeded on the principle that Mapplebeck’s duty, as a schoolmaster in charge of a small group of eight boys, was to use all the reasonable care for the pupils which a reasonably careful parent would exercise in respect of his own children. This standard was adopted in the Court of Appeal in England in Williams v. Eady[2], and was recently held to be applicable by this Court in McKay v. Board of Govan School Unit No. 29 of Saskatchewan[3]. I agree with both the Courts below that this is the proper standard by which to judge Mapplebeck’s conduct in the circumstances here disclosed.

In applying this test to a schoolmaster in charge of a class consisting of deaf mutes, Chief Justice Milvain, however, went on to say:

The fact that this particular school deals with those who are handicapped through being deaf and dumb undoubtedly increases the degree of care that would be expected, because I am sure that a reasonably careful parent of a deaf and dumb child is going to have to be careful with respect to features that the parent of a child so unhampered would not have to be careful of.

There is no doubt that the operation which was contemplated, that of trimming the drawers of the dresser on the circular saw was one involving danger. The danger is unquestionably increased when the safety guards cannot be used and that danger is, of course, I think increased when the operators are those who are handicapped through being deaf and dumb because one cannot warn them rapidly of what may be going wrong.

(The italics are my own.)

The negligence found by Milvain C.J., was “insufficient care in the way of close supervision with respect to the operation”.

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If the appellant had been in possession of all his faculties, I do not think that it could be suggested that Mapplebeck failed to exercise the required degree of care towards a youth who was an intelligent, observant and careful student with considerable aptitude and experience in the use of power tools and who was aware of the dangers involved in the use of an unguarded power-saw.

If such a boy had been able to hear and talk and had been allocated another normal student to work with him in completing the task which he had in hand while the master moved 15 or 25 feet away in the same room, the master would, in my view, have unquestionably discharged his duty of care.

The duty of a schoolmaster in the role of a careful parent is subject to the limitation described by Denning L.J., in Clark v. Monmouthshire County Council[4], a decision of the Court of Appeal in England. In the course of his reasons for judgment at p. 247, Denning L.J. said:

The duty of a school does not extend to constant supervision of all the boys all the time; that is not practicable. Only reasonable supervision is required.

In that case an accident occurred when there was a scuffle between two boys trying to get a knife from a third boy and the complaint made against the school was that there should have been closer supervision of the boys at play. In this regard Denning L.J. said at p. 248:

The incident would take place in the fraction of a second which the presence of prefects, or indeed of a master, would not have done anything to prevent at all.

In the same case, Evershed M.R. said at p. 251:

But I cannot myself, therefore, conclude that any lack of care within the scope of the obligation which was laid down by Lord Esher in Williams v. Eady …was established. I cannot see any good ground for holding that what did unhappily occur could be treated as the natural consequence of any absence

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…at the time of somebody from the staff being actually present there for the purpose of supervision.

In leaving the appellant and Turner to carry on with their work, Mapplebeck assessed the situation as follows:

I felt that Marvin was doing very well, the operation was one that he could do within his capability, and I felt there was no need to stand completely at his side while eight, seven other boys or so worked by themselves with other hand tools which also need surveillance.

The question in this case appears to be whether, having regard to the fact that the students were deaf mutes, Mapplebeck was guilty of a breach of duty which he would not have owed to a normal boy and which either caused or contributed to the appellant’s injury. The learned trial judge has found that the reason why a higher duty of supervision and care is owing to such students by the master is “because one cannot warn them rapidly of what may be going wrong”, and I agree with this assessment of the nature of the duty owing to the appellant.

The way in which this accident happened must therefore be considered in order to determine whether there was any indication that anything might be “going wrong” in respect of which Mapplebeck could have given warning even if he had been standing at the appellant’s side, or whether the work was proceeding normally when the accident happened in a flash and without any time for warning.

In finding that the appellant was 40 per cent at fault, Chief Justice Milvain described his role in the accident as follows:

I am satisfied that he did not take adequate care for his own protection under the circumstances. Had he done so, because of the distances that his hands would be from the saw in holding this particular drawer, he would be out of danger. There is nothing to indicate that the machine jammed in any way causing a sudden happening that would throw him on to the saw. What is rather indicated to me from the evidence, particularly of Turner, is that his attention drifted momentarily and his hand struck the saw.

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The finding that the appellant’s hand struck the saw because his attention drifted momentarily was concurred in by the Appellate Division and it is in my opinion decisive of this case because momentary inattention cannot be the subject of warning of any kind, and as I agree with Milvain C.J. that the additional duty resting on a schoolmaster towards students who are deaf and dumb is based on his inability “to warn them rapidly of what may be going wrong”, it follows in my view that where nothing is “going wrong” against which such a warning could be given, there can be no breach of that duty.

It has been contended on behalf of the appellant that the finding of momentary inattention on the part of the appellant which was subscribed to by both the Courts below, cannot be supported by the evidence and it has rightly been said that although this Court will not normally interfere with concurrent findings of facts of two provincial Courts, it is nevertheless under a duty to do so if it is satisfied that such a finding is clearly wrong.

There is a unique quality about this case in that the evidence of the appellant and Turner, which would normally have been the best evidence of the way in which the accident occurred, was given through an interpreter who had some knowledge of the means of manual communication employed by those who are deaf and dumb, but who appears to have had difficulty in reproducing the thoughts and statements which the handicapped witnesses were attempting to convey. The result is that the evidence of these two vital witnesses, as it appears in the record, is sometimes almost unintelligible. The great advantage afforded to a trial judge as opposed to an appellate court has frequently been referred to in terms of his ability to see and hear the witnesses, but in the present case the advantage of the trial judge was to a large extent limited to what he could see, and I am satisfied that the demonstrations given by the two boys, and particularly by Turner, using the very drawer with which they had been working at the time of the accident, had a strong influence on Chief Justice Milvain in reaching the conclusion which he did as to the appellant’s momentary inattention.

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It is, in my view, impossible for this Court to recreate from the record and the descriptions given by counsel, the motions made by Turner which left such a clear impression on the trial judge, and under all the circumstances I cannot be satisfied that the finding that the appellant’s “attention drifted momentarily and his hand struck the saw” was clearly or “absolutely” wrong so as to justify this Court in interfering with the concurrent findings to that effect in both the Courts below. As I have indicated, I am of opinion that the proper inference to be drawn from the evidence as a whole is that the accident was caused by momentary inattention on the part of the appellant.

This accident appears to me to be of the kind described by Denning L.J. in Clark v. Monmouthshire County Council, supra, when he said:

The incident would take place in the fraction of a second which the presence of… a master, would not have done anything to prevent at all.

For all these reasons, as well as for those so fully set forth in the reasons for judgment of Allen J.A. in the Appellate Division, I would dismiss this appeal with costs.

The judgment of Hall, Spence and Laskin JJ. was delivered by

LASKIN J.—The plaintiff, the appellant in this Court, suffered a serious injury to his left hand when it came into contact with the unguarded blade of a circular power table saw which he was operating at the time. He was a student at the Alberta School for the Deaf where he spent about three hours a week in the woodworking shop. He had been constructing a six‑drawer chest under the supervision of the manual arts instructor M.W. Mapplebeck, and, owing to an error in measurement, the drawers, when assembled, were too deep. The plaintiff was directed to trim two edges of each drawer and it was during this operation, in circumstances detailed below, that the accident happened.

The trial judge, Chief Justice J.V.H. Milvain, found negligence on the instructor’s part in failing to give adequate supervision of work which was

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dangerous. But because the plaintiff’s attention drifted momentarily and his hand then struck the saw, he found contributory negligence on the plaintiff’s part and fixed his degree of fault at 40 per cent. The Appellate Division held that no inference of negligence could be made against Mapplebeck in respect of any failure to supervise the plaintiff’s work more closely, and that the plaintiff had only himself to blame for the injury; accordingly, the action was dismissed. The plaintiff seeks restoration of the judgment at trial, contesting neither the apportionment of fault nor the quantum of damages which were fixed, on the apportioned basis, at $10,716.60. The respondents, the instructor and the Crown in right of Alberta, operator of the school, ask for a revision in their favour of the apportionment of fault if it should be held here that the instructor was negligent.

The plaintiff was 18 years of age at the time of the accident which occurred on November 30, 1961. He was a deaf mute and had been attending the school since 1956. Although he had used the power table saw over the previous two or three years, the occasion of the injury was the first upon which he had been directed to trim chest drawers. The drawers, which were 30 inches wide, 15 inches deep and 10 inches high, could have been disassembled to correct the mis-measurement, but instead the plaintiff was instructed to trim two edges of each drawer by three-sixteenths of an inch with the power table saw, the blade of which projected about three-quarters to one inch above the table top. This, on the evidence, was not a usual operation on chest drawers, and it involved prior removal of the safety guard and associated safety elements including anti-kickback teeth. The removal was effected by Mapplebeck and the plaintiff, and the former then demonstrated one or two cuts and watched the plaintiff do one or two. Another student was directed to assist the plaintiff by handing him the drawers for each cut and receiving the work after each sawing operation. Mapplebeck moved some 15 to 25 feet away to another work bench, and from there he glanced occasionally towards the plaintiff. The sound of the saw indicated normal operation but after about ten

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minutes the sound changed and Mapplebeck saw that the plaintiff had been injured.

The trial judge concluded that the trimming operations with the unguarded saw were dangerous; that the duty of care owed by the instructor, being that of a reasonably careful parent, had to be assessed in the light of the handicaps of the student; and that, in the circumstances (to quote from the reasons at trial), “insufficient care in the way of close supervision was extended with respect to this operation”. As already noted, he also made a finding of contributory negligence against the plaintiff, but assessed the greater fault (60 per cent) against Mapplebeck.

The Appellate Division accepted the trial judge’s findings of fact, which were (so far as material) that the operation of the unguarded saw involved danger which was increased by the plaintiff’s handicaps; that Mapplebeck was a competent instructor and had demonstrated how the cuts should be made; that the plaintiff, notwithstanding his disabilities, was intelligent and observant, with aptitude and experience in the use of power equipment in the shop, and with awareness of the danger of operating an unguarded saw; and he knew that the particular operation could only be performed with the guard off.

The trial judge made no finding on whether or not the plaintiff had previously worked with an unguarded power saw. The Appellate Division in arriving at its conclusion adverse to the plaintiff, said there was evidence that the plaintiff had experience in using the saw without the guard, and also relied upon the evidence of one Cunningham, an expert defence witness, that the operation in question was not hazardous. If that was Cunningham’s evidence, it was not accepted by the trial judge; and I do not see how the Appellate Division could consistently accept the trial judge’s findings on the element of danger and yet purport to rely on Cunningham’s testimony.

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Equally unjustified is the reliance of the Appellate Division on alleged experience of the plaintiff in the use of the saw without a guard. Bazant, who was Mapplebeck’s predecessor as instructor at the school, was not certain on the point; and, indeed, Mapplebeck’s evidence shows that, at the most, the plaintiff had operated an unguarded saw only when the material on which he then worked provided protection against the bare blade. The occasion of the accident was the first time, on the evidence, that the plaintiff had cut completely through wood where he was without protection either of the guard or the material worked upon. Power tools had been in use for two or three years before the accident, and such experience as the plaintiff had must be related, of course, to the limited time that he would be operating them in the woodworking shop. The evidence does not disclose any estimate of this time apart from the total weekly time in the woodworking shop.

An undoubted difficulty about some of the material evidence in the case—that of the plaintiff and of Turner, the student who was directed to assist him—was in the necessary use of interpreters in the sign language. The answers of these witnesses were at times not responsive to the questions. Turner’s evidence indicates that the accident happened after one cut had been done on a drawer which the witness then grasped to pass back to the plaintiff for the required second cut. The trial judge referred to Turner’s role in the course of his oral judgment, delivered on April 30, 1969, at the conclusion of the evidence and argument on liability; and it is reasonable to conclude that his finding of negligence in the lack of adequate supervision embraced the likelihood of danger in the handling of the drawers between the two young men, one of whom was operating a completely unguarded power saw that kept running while the drawers were passed to him.

The finding of want of sufficiently close supervision must also be judged in the light of evidence that the plaintiff was the only student working with power equipment at the time of the accident. There were six students, in addition to the plain-

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tiff and Turner, who were then in the woodworking shop, and they were engaged on projects for which they used hand tools.

The question of the negligence of Mapplebeck in this case is not foreclosed by the proof given of the plaintiff’s awareness of the danger in the operations to which he was assigned. Nor can his momentary inattention provide complete exoneration of the defendants if there was a breach by Mapplebeck of his duty of care to the plaintiff. In my opinion, the Appellate Division took too limited a view of that duty in its conclusion that Mapplebeck’s conduct in moving away from close proximity to the work did not amount to a failure to take normal and proper precautions against injury to the plaintiff. The emphasis of the Appellate Division was on the simplicity of the operation as an operation rather than on the danger surrounding its execution; and, again, on the experience of the plaintiff, shored up by the short demonstration, rather than on the fact that this was the first time that he had been assigned such a task and the first time that he had been asked to operate a power table saw without any guard or other protection. I do not agree with the view of the Appellate Division that Mapplebeck was free from negligence in following allegedly approved general practice in the way he handled the assignment to the plaintiff. The evidence of Burke, a witness for the plaintiff, which was relied on for the application of this principle, does not carry it because he spoke only of what he did or would do in his school shop. The trial judge rightly made no finding of any approved general practice on the basis of Burke’s evidence, evidence which included the opinion that the trimming by power saw was not a usual operation and that he would want somebody who was fairly competent on the saw before assigning such work to him.

The duty of care owing to a student, especially a handicapped one as in this case, in respect of his personal safety while operating dangerous machinery, is a stricter one than that owed by an employer to an employee working with dangerous

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machinery. Cases such as Harriman v. Martin[5], in the English Court of Appeal, show how sternly the duty of care for the safety of an employee has been regarded in a jurisdiction where the common law of employer liability has been extensively litigated. The strictness with which a duty of care is regarded reflects the application of the ordinary law of negligence under which the standard of care to guard against unreasonable risk of injury must be assessed, in the particular circumstances, “by balancing the magnitude of the risk, in the light of an accident happening and the possible seriousness of its consequences, against the difficulty, expense or any other disadvantage of desisting from the venture or taking a particular precaution”: see Fleming, The Law of Torts, 3rd ed., 1965, at p. 118. As was said by Lord Macmillan in Read v. J. Lyons & Co. Ltd.[6], at p. 173, “the law in all cases exacts a degree of care commensurate with the risk created.”

The findings of the trial judge established that there was a high risk of injury, findings which are supportable when one considers that this was the plaintiff’s first experience with a completely unguarded power-saw and his first experience in trimming chest drawers and working with a fellow student on that operation. Either one of two courses could reasonably and easily have been followed by the instructor. He could have had the drawers disassembled, in which case the error was correctable by using the power-saw with the guard attached; or, he could have stayed with the plaintiff until the job was done with the unguarded saw. There were only twelve edges to trim and the other students were working with hand tools. I do not find it improbable that the accident would not have happened if the instructor had directly supervised the operations until they were finished.

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I would, accordingly, allow the appeal and restore the judgment at trial. The plaintiff should have his costs throughout.

One further matter arises as a result of this conclusion. A doctor had been joined as a defendant in the plaintiff’s action but the suit against him was dismissed with costs payable by the plaintiff. The trial judge had originally intimated that the plaintiff might add these costs to those payable to him by the unsuccessful defendants but, on reconsideration, he decided not to make this “Bullock” type order because the cause of action against the doctor was different from the one upon which the plaintiff succeeded against the other defendants. With the leave of the trial judge, this issue was raised on appeal, but because the Appellate Division concluded that the plaintiff’s main action failed it did not consider it.

Before this Court, the appellant contended that the trial judge had refused to make the requested order because of an assumed want of jurisdiction rather than in the exercise of discretion. Although his language may have suggested this, he was quite familiar with the Alberta Rules of Court, and I would not construe his ruling as turning on a jurisdictional ground. Having regard to s. 44(1) of the Supreme Court Act, R.S.C. 1952, c. 259, as amended, the matter is not one upon which an appeal lies to this Court. The appeal thereon is hence quashed but without costs.

Appeal allowed and judgment at trial restored, with costs, MARTLAND and RITCHIE JJ. dissenting.

Solicitors for the plaintiffs, appellants: Hurlburt, Reynolds, Stevenson & Agrios, Edmonton, and Moshansky & Blonsky, Vegreville.

Solicitors for the defendant, respondent, Her Majesty The Queen in right of Alberta: Parlee, Irving, Mustard & Rodney, Edmonton.

Solicitor for the defendant, respondent, M.W. Mapplebeck: S.A. Friedman, Edmonton.