A former B.C. elementary teacher who pled guilty in April 2007 to assault and battery of a student is not covered for his legal defence or damages under his residential insurance policy, the B.C. Supreme Court has confirmed.
Joseph Gilbert Dube, formerly an elementary teacher with the Greater Victoria School Board, is alleged in a civil lawsuit to have yelled and screamed at a student, struck him with a pointing stick, lifted him off the ground by his clothes and dropped him, and threw him up against a wall in the classroom. The allegations in the civil lawsuit have not been proven in court.
Dube sued his insurer for denying coverage. Dube argued that a policy exclusion for “bodily injury or property damage caused by any intentional or criminal act” did not apply in his case because the civil lawsuit against him by the student also contained allegations of negligence made against the school board.
Dube cited existing caselaw in which an insurer had a duty to defend a policyholder, even though the policyholder’s criminal acts were excluded by the policy, because the lawsuit contained unrelated – or ‘non-derivative’ – allegations for which the insurer owed the policyholder a defence.
A B.C. judge, however, found that in this particular case, the unproven allegations of negligence made against the school board were in fact linked to the assault and battery that triggered the denial of coverage. For example, the plaintiff alleged that the school board was negligent because it knew Dube had psychological and/or mental health issues, but failed to take steps to remove him as a teacher prior to the assault and battery against the plaintiff.
In one particular twist, Dube argued that he was covered under the policy for “damages because of unintentional bodily injury or property damage.”
The court pointed out that the insurance policy contained, in addition to an exclusion for criminal acts, a policy exclusion for damage caused by “sexual, physical, psychological or emotional abuse, molestation or harassment, including corporal punishment by, at the direction of, or with the knowledge of any person insured by this policy.”
Dube argued that the word “abuse” in the exclusion was essentially the same as the word “injury” throughout the policy. Therefore, the word “abuse” did not carry any meaning that would deny policy coverage available for bodily “injury” generally.
“I disagree,” the court found, citing dictionary definitions of the two words. “The terms ‘injury’ and ‘abuse’ have distinctly different meanings.”
