In the vast majority of cases where you suffer an injury, you are entitled to a claim for non-pecuniary damages. That is a legal term for an award of damages as a result of pain and suffering and loss of amenities of life.
In 1978, the Supreme Court of Canada capped the amount of non-pecuniary damages that you can recover in a personal injury lawsuit at $100,000 adjusted for inflation. By early 2008. the figure was increased to around $312,000 being the maximum recovery in Canada. Therefore, even the most severely injured person (e.g. severe brain injury with quadriplegia) only gets around $312,000 for non-pecuniary damages.
As a result, the amount of non-pecuniary damages you are entitled to receive has to be put into perspective with the maximum allowed.
The amount of non-pecuniary damages is usually determined by way of precedent. In other words, what the Courts have awarded for similar type injuries is used to judge the award for your case. The difficulty is that other cases have some similarities but many differences and so there is no one case you can point to that is similar on all fronts. Rather, the best you can do is find some similar cases and argue a range of non-pecuniary damages.
If you do not want to pursue your claim through a lawyer, the best thing to do is go down to the local law library and have a look at the BC Civ. series, a yellow bound series sorted by year which includes a section on personal injury. You can leaf through the pages and find cases similar to the one you are involved in.
Alternatively, you can go to the government web site and search their judgment database to find similar cases.
The problem with finding similar cases is that they may not have an influence on ICBC if you are self-represented. ICBC, a few years back, put in place certain directives to the adjusters suggesting their own cap for mild, moderate and severe soft tissue injuries in terms of non-pecuniary damages. Naturally, the amount ICBC says these claims are worth is substantially lower than what the Courts actually award.
Therefore, you should not accept ICBC’s internal directives on non-pecuniary damages at face value unless you do not want to go the lawyer route.
