One person's unremitting nightmare can, for another, be the stuff of humdrum life at the office.
Take lawsuits, for example. A fire destroys a business; the owner files an insurance claim. The insurer denies the claim with an arson defence, leaving the claimant with no choice but to sue or abandon the claim.
Former Pilot Insurance Co. employee Chris Porter of Toronto has navigated the litigation process both as an insurance employee and as a private individual.
Having recently emerged successfully from private litigation in which he battled Canada's legal system in a matter he says deprived him - at least temporarily - of his professional reputation, he sums up the experience thus: "It took an incredible toll."
Porter, a senior claims examiner, was involved in the initial handing of a 1994 Ontario fire claim that led to the landmark February 2002 Supreme Court of Canada judgment in Whiten vs Pilot Insurance Co.
The judgment restored a 1996 jury award of $1 million in punitive damages, a rarely employed sanction.
Homeowner Daphne Whiten and her husband Keith (who died a couple of years ago from cancer) had Pilot Insurance as their insurer when - on a bitterly cold winter's night - a fire believed to have been ignited by a faulty heater destroyed their rural home near Haliburton, Ont.
The Ontario insurer, the Supreme Court noted, used an arson defence to avoid paying the claim. But the Whitens, despite being in desperate financial circumstances, managed to claw their way up to the Supreme Court through the gritty hard work of Bay Street lawyer Gary Will.
The outcome proved costly for an industry that, in Canada, had hitherto been dealt with leniently by the courts in cases where bad faith was proven. The previous largest punitive damages ever awarded against an insurer in Canada was $15,000.
With the maximum suddenly having been increased, Canada's insurers now found themselves in unfamiliar legal territory - one that resembled the habitat of their American brethren that can be financially punishing to those who abuse the economic superiority they hold over most of their clients.
The fallout from this profoundly significant case has continued in the years since the Supreme Court decision. Chris Porter, who ended up as collateral damage in this sordid affair, has only just recently begun rebuilding his reputation after leaving Pilot in April 2000.
Porter fought hard, taking on the judicial, insurance and legal establishment in a grim quest to set the record straight about who was really responsible for the decision to stonewall the Whiten claim.
The original decision, which the trial judge noted was abetted by an external lawyer acting in the handling of the claim, was made at Pilot's executive level.
However, the Supreme Court's Whiten vs Pilot Insurance judgment instead made it look like Porter played a significant role. Porter was cast as a management-level decision-maker, drawing attention away from the higher-ups who were actually responsible.
In March 2002, legal counsel acting for Porter wrote the Supreme Court about the error. Porter's correct title was "senior claims examiner," the lawyer wrote; not "senior claims manager" as stated in the judgment.
The court issued a revised judgment in April 2002 that corrected Porter's title.
But Porter protested this didn't go far enough. He wanted the judgment to include information about his handling of the claim, such as his desire to settle for an amount that would have covered the loss. "My role was completely opposite to what was described in the reasons for judgment," he wrote the court.
The court wrote back that this information was not put before the lower court, so there was nothing further it could do.
Later, Porter sued Montreal law firm Robinson Sheppard Shapiro for defamation over its publication on its website of the erroneous material from the Supreme Court's initial lawsuit, hard copies of which it sent to 450 of its clients (many of whom are insurance companies).
Extensive litigation ensued, with Porter winning the right to a trial after appealing a summary judgment dismissing his lawsuit. On the third day of the trial in January 2006, Robinson Sheppard Shapiro settled the lawsuit by acknowledging that Porter did not deny the Whiten claim.
Sally Turney, vice-president of corporate communications with Pilot's new parent company Aviva Canada Inc. in Toronto, declined comment. She explained that Pilot does not comment on matters involving past or current employees.
Stuart Kistruck, a Pilot president and CEO who left the position following a high-level shakeup in 2003, told me in November 2002 when I was researching another article that his company regretted how the claim was handled.
"This is one of those cases that got off the rails," Kistruck said. "I'd like to give the Pilot side of the story. But there is not a Pilot side of the story ... I wish this never happened."
James Hewitt, Kistruck's successor, says the Whiten affair was an isolated case.
"We have taken the lessons that we learned from this experience seriously," wrote the recently retired Hewitt. "We have made changes to our claims policies and procedures to ensure that situations like this are handled differently."
Insurance Bureau of Canada spokesman John Karapita of Toronto said the Porter affair was not considered "an industry issue," therefore the IBC is not involved.
Porter's insurance background proved to be a crucial asset in addressing the difficult challenges he faced in repairing the damage to his name.
Over the years, I've met businesspeople who have been wronged by insurers or lawyers and then destroyed by an obsessive, ineffectual quest for justice doomed at the outset by a lack of the prerequisite financial, emotional and intellectual resources.
It was interesting, therefore, to observe Porter experiencing how, for ordinary mortals, a lawsuit becomes an all-consuming enterprise. As a private individual in a position adverse to that of a powerful industry, he even had difficulty finding a lawyer willing to bring his case to court. "I was like a leper," he says.
The legal ordeal wiped out Porter's life savings. Though he was able to find similar-paying work with another insurer in Toronto after leaving Pilot, the income was not enough to cover his legal costs.
"I know now what poor Keith and Daphne (Whiten) went through," he says.
When the other insurance company he was working for let him go the year the Supreme Court handed down its decision, Porter's financial hardship began in earnest. Accustomed to supporting himself, he now had to look to his kin and in-laws for support.
Now in the prime of his working years, Porter claims Canada's insurance industry has shunned him, forcing him to scratch out a living. "The insurance industry and legal industry will not send work even though most who know me know I would provide good service," he says.
The IBC's Karapita was nonplussed over this assertion. "From our perspective, this is about an individual that I've never heard of."
(Brock Ketcham is an Edmonton-based writer who specializes in consumer and public policy issues. He can be reached at brock@businessedge.ca)
