Jacobi v Griffiths: Where the Bazley Enterprise Risk Test Draws Its Line — and Why Three Supreme Court Justices Disagreed

By Dr. Aris Lavranos June 17, 2026

Jacobi v Griffiths refined the limits of vicarious liability for the wrongful acts of employees.

When the Supreme Court of Canada handed down Bazley v Curry on June 17, 1999, it simultaneously released its decision in Jacobi v Griffiths, a companion case decided the same day, by the same court, under the same enterprise risk framework, and reaching the opposite result. Where Bazley found vicarious liability, Jacobi did not. The margin was four justices to three.

The existence of this companion case is not incidental to understanding Bazley. It is essential. A legal test that only ever produces one kind of outcome is not a test; it is a conclusion. Jacobi v Griffiths is where the Bazley test is actually tested: where the court had to confront facts that were similar in category but different in kind, apply the same framework, and determine where the boundary of institutional liability sits. That the court divided 4-3 on where that boundary falls tells you something important about the difficulty of the question and the genuine legal stakes involved.

This article examines Jacobi v Griffiths in full: the facts, the majority’s reasoning, the dissent’s competing argument, and what the decision establishes, taken on its own terms rather than merely as a foil for its companion. These are not abstract legal questions. Behind them are two children, a program director who abused them, and a non-profit organization whose legal responsibility for what happened was the subject of serious judicial disagreement.

The Central Distinction Jacobi v Griffiths Makes

Before examining the facts, it is worth stating the doctrinal contribution of Jacobi v Griffiths clearly, because it is the frame through which everything else should be read.

Bazley v Curry established that an organization can be held vicariously liable for an employee’s sexual misconduct where the organization’s enterprise materially increased the risk of that misconduct, specifically by creating conditions of power, intimacy, and dependency over vulnerable people that made the harm more likely. Jacobi v Griffiths answers the question Bazley left open: how close must the connection between enterprise and harm be before that test is satisfied?

The answer the majority gave is this: the connection must be more than coincidence. Almost any employment involving contact with the public provides some opportunity for misconduct. What the Bazley test requires is that the organization specifically created (through the design of the role and the conditions it imposed) the particular power, intimacy, or authority over vulnerable people that made the specific harm more likely. Merely providing access is not enough. Creating the conditions that made exploitation more likely is.

This distinction, between opportunity as a coincidental by-product of employment and risk as a structural feature of the enterprise, is what Jacobi v Griffiths establishes as the outer boundary of the Bazley principle. It is the case that says: here, the line stops.

Jacobi involved the abuse of children in a recreational program, but the club escaped liability.

The Facts: Vernon, British Columbia, 1982

The Boys’ and Girls’ Club of Vernon

The Boys’ and Girls’ Club of Vernon was a non-profit organization incorporated in 1976 under the British Columbia Societies Act. Its stated objectives included providing behaviour guidance and promoting the health, social, educational, vocational, and character development of boys and girls. It operated recreational facilities where children from the community could come after school or on Saturdays to participate in organized activities. The Club was, as the trial judge found, “a fun place to go and was safe.” It was not a residential facility. Children came during after-school hours and went home to their families at the end of the day.

The Club employed Harry Charles Griffiths as its Program Director from 1980 to 1992. His function was to supervise volunteer staff and organize recreational activities and the occasional outing. He was encouraged to cultivate positive rapport with the children (to be a role model and mentor) but he was not given parental authority, was not authorized to provide intimate personal care, and had no job-created authority to involve himself in the private lives of the children or their families beyond what occurred during Club activities. As the Club’s sole senior employee, he reported to the Executive Director. The Club had no power or authority over the children; they went home to their parents after every activity.

The Jacobi Siblings

In 1982, Jody Jacobi was thirteen years old and her brother Randal, known as Randy, was eleven. They lived at home with their mother in Vernon. The Club was within walking distance of their home, and both children participated in Club activities after school or on Saturdays. Randy played floor hockey. Jody did gymnastics. Both Jody and Randy came from a home life the trial judge described as not easy. There was, in his words, “a lot of turmoil at home,” circumstances that made the Club’s community presence and stability more significant to them than to children from more settled backgrounds.

Griffiths cultivated a relationship with Jody and Randy through his position at the Club. Over time, he groomed them, gaining their trust and that of their mother, to the point where the children began visiting him at his private home. Their mother gave permission for these visits, understanding them as the natural extension of a trusted community figure’s mentoring relationship.

The Abuse and Its Discovery

The sexual assaults committed by Griffiths against Randy and Jody occurred almost entirely away from the Club and outside working hours, at Griffiths’ private home. There was one exception: a single incident of sexual touching of Jody in the Club’s van, which occurred during a Club-related sporting event. This van incident would acquire legal significance as the litigation developed.

The trial judge found that “essentially there was a single incident involving” Randy and “one incident of sexual intercourse involving” Jody “following several lesser incidents.” These events occurred in 1982, but neither child disclosed what had happened until 1992, approximately ten years later. After the disclosure prompted a police investigation, Griffiths’ employment was terminated. He pleaded guilty to fourteen counts of sexual assault involving the appellants and other children, and was jailed for six years. The civil litigation addressed whether the Club, which had committed no fault in hiring or supervising Griffiths, bore vicarious liability for his actions.

The Journey Through the Courts

At Trial: Vicarious Liability Found

The trial judge, Wilkinson J., found the Boys’ and Girls’ Club vicariously liable for Griffiths’ sexual assaults. He found that Griffiths had cultivated a “god-like” relationship with the children (accepting Jody’s description in her testimony of Griffiths as having appeared “almost god-like” to her) and that the cultivation of his victims took place on Club premises during Club working hours. His trust-based relationship with the children had developed through and because of his position at the Club, and without that special relationship the actual assaults would not have taken place. He held that policy considerations required the imposition of vicarious liability to deter institutional sexual predation.

The British Columbia Court of Appeal: Appeal Allowed

The British Columbia Court of Appeal allowed the Club’s appeal and set aside the finding of vicarious liability. The court divided on its reasoning. Huddart J.A., applying a control-oriented approach, found no basis for liability: the Club had no authority over the children beyond Club activities and Griffiths had no job-created authority to act in the intimate way that the abuse required. Hollinrake J.A. and Donald J.A. concurred with Huddart J.A. Finch J.A. agreed with the result.

Newbury J.A. took a different position. She would have allowed the appeal in part, denying liability for the assaults that occurred at Griffiths’ home, where the connection to the employment was too tenuous, but finding liability in relation to the single incident in the Club van, where the connection to an authorized Club activity was closer. Her partial analysis of the van incident ran through the litigation all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court of Canada: A 4-3 Split

The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal, upholding the Court of Appeal’s conclusion that the Club was not vicariously liable. But the court divided sharply: four justices in the majority, three in dissent. The majority was written by Justice Binnie, joined by Cory, Iacobucci, and Major JJ. The dissent was written by McLachlin J., who would become Chief Justice of Canada approximately six months later, in January 2000, joined by L’Heureux-Dubé and Bastarache JJ.

Both sides agreed that the applicable test was the enterprise risk framework McLachlin J. herself had articulated in Bazley: the two-step analysis and five-factor sufficient connection assessment. They disagreed fundamentally on how that test applied to these facts.

The majority held the club was not vicariously liable, distinguishing Bazley.

The Majority: Binnie J. and the Limits of Enterprise Risk

Step One: The State of Precedent

Justice Binnie began, as the Bazley framework requires, by surveying the existing precedents on vicarious liability in cases of employee sexual misconduct. His survey, which ranged across Canadian, American, and English decisions, confirmed what McLachlin J. had acknowledged in Bazley: the case law was inconclusive. Some courts had imposed liability in circumstances resembling Jacobi; others had declined to do so on similar facts. The cases did not clearly resolve on which side of the line Jacobi fell. The analysis therefore moved to step two: applying the policy-based enterprise risk framework.

The Five Factors Applied

Factor One: The Opportunity the Enterprise Afforded

The majority accepted that the Club had given Griffiths access to children in a general sense. His position made it possible for him to meet Randy and Jody, to be in their presence regularly, and to begin cultivating their trust. But the majority drew a critical distinction between access as a by-product of employment and access as a structural feature of enterprise design.

The Children’s Foundation in Bazley had created specific, planned conditions of intimate physical access (nighttime routines, bathing, bedroom supervision) architecturally embedded in the enterprise itself. The Club organized recreational activities. It did not authorize Griffiths to enter the private lives of the children or their families. There was “no job-created authority for [Griffiths] to insinuate himself into the intimate lives of these children.” The access he had was coincidental to the employment rather than structurally produced by it.

Factor Two: The Extent to Which the Wrong Furthered the Employer’s Aims

Sexual assault clearly did not further the Club’s aims. The Bazley framework asks the subtler question: did authorized activities create conditions the wrongful acts could exploit? In Bazley, the authorized work, intimate physical care of troubled children, was itself the platform the abuse used. In Jacobi, the authorized activities were recreational: floor hockey, gymnastics, outings. These gave Griffiths contact with children in the ordinary sense that any organized activity creates contact between a leader and participants, but did not create conditions through which a predator could gain intimate access to children’s bodies or private lives as a natural extension of doing his job.

Factor Three: The Extent to Which the Wrong Was Related to Intimacy Inherent in the Enterprise

This was the most contested factor and the point at which the majority and dissent most directly disagreed. The dissent argued that the Club’s encouragement of Griffiths to form bonds of trust and respect created intimacy comparable to Bazley. The majority rejected this explicitly and firmly.

Justice Binnie stated: “I do not accept that an enterprise that seeks to provide a positive role model thereby encourages intimacy. Nor do I believe that ‘mentoring’, as such, puts one on the slippery slope to sexual abuse. If it did, any organization that offered ‘role models’ would be looking at no-fault liability.”

The distinction the majority drew was between the structured, physical, and comprehensive intimacy the Children’s Foundation mandated (intimate parental care including physical contact, bedtime routines, and constant one-on-one supervision of a child entrusted entirely to the institution) and the relational warmth that a recreational club appropriately encourages its staff to bring to their work. The former creates conditions that a predator can weaponize as a direct extension of their authorized role. The latter is a general social good, not a specific risk architecture. Intimacy between Griffiths and individual children, even maintained on a non-sexual level, would in fact have been destructive of the Club’s program, leading to problems of favouritism, feelings of exclusion, and dissension.

Factor Four: The Extent of Power Conferred on the Employee Over the Victim

Curry in Bazley had been invested with comprehensive authority over the children in his care. He controlled their environment, routines, access to comfort and care, and bedtime. Griffiths organized recreational programs. He had no job-created authority over where children slept, what they ate, when they woke, or any dimension of their private lives. The children were free to walk out of the Club at any time and went home to their mother every night.

On the “god-like” characterization that Wilkinson J. had accepted from Jody’s testimony, Binnie J. noted directly that the only reference to “god-like” in the trial judgment was Jody’s own description of her subjective reaction; she had said Griffiths had seemed “almost god-like” to her and “because of that she had some thought that it must be okay.” This subjective response, however real and significant to Jody personally, did not reflect any state of affairs “willed into existence by the Club or that was foreseeably incidental to its enterprise.” The power Griffiths exercised in perpetrating the assaults was not conferred by the Club; it was created by his own manipulation for personal gratification.

Factor Five: The Vulnerability of the Potential Victims

The majority acknowledged that Jody and Randy came from difficult home circumstances and that children generally are vulnerable to exploitation by trusted adults. But the specific vulnerability that matters under the Bazley framework is vulnerability created or significantly amplified by the institutional arrangement: the particular dependency of a residential care child on their substitute parent. The children at the Boys’ and Girls’ Club were not in that position. They lived at home with their family. The Club was a safe community space, not a total care environment.

The Location Factor

Justice Binnie was careful to note that the location and timing of the assaults, at Griffiths’ private home, after hours, were not in themselves determinative. Spatial and temporal factors do not answer the vicarious liability question alone. But they were part of a larger picture pointing against liability. The abuse occurred in a private domestic setting Griffiths had accessed through patient personal grooming undertaken entirely on his own initiative, exploiting the general social access his employment provided, but not weaponizing any specific power the employment had conferred.

The Van Incident

The single exception, the incident of sexual touching in the Club’s van, was acknowledged by the majority but not treated as determinative of the overall liability question. The majority’s framework assessed the totality of the enterprise and its relationship to the harm, not whether any single incident had an employment connection sufficient to attract liability on its own. Newbury J.A.’s view at the Court of Appeal, that the sufficient connection test should be applied incident by incident, finding liability at least for the van incident, was not adopted by the SCC majority.

The Policy Dimension: Non-Profit Organizations

Beyond the five-factor analysis, the majority considered the policy implications of finding liability on these facts. Non-profit organizations cannot price their services to incorporate litigation risk, cannot pass costs to consumers, and do not have the financial depth of commercial enterprises to absorb large no-fault liability awards. The majority was clear that non-profit status alone does not exempt an organization from vicarious liability; Bazley had settled that. But the breadth of the liability rule being urged by the appellants would impose costs on the charitable sector disproportionate to the genuine risk created by recreational mentoring programs, and the rational response of many non-profit organizations to all-encompassing no-fault liability for the criminal acts of employees would be to abandon programming for children altogether.

This was a secondary policy consideration reinforcing the primary holding that the strong connection test was not met, not an independent basis for the outcome.

The Dissent: McLachlin J. and the Argument for Broader Enterprise Liability

A Principled Disagreement, Not a Different Test

The three dissenting justices, McLachlin, L’Heureux-Dubé, and Bastarache JJ., agreed that the Bazley framework applied. They disagreed profoundly about what it required on these facts. McLachlin J.’s dissent is not a departure from enterprise risk reasoning; it is a more expansive application of it. Because the author of the dissent was the same justice who had written the majority in Bazley, the disagreement between Binnie J. and McLachlin J. in Jacobi is essentially a disagreement about the scope of the principle McLachlin J. herself had articulated in the companion case.

The Dissent’s First Argument: Employment Created the Trust That Enabled the Harm

McLachlin J.’s central argument was that the majority had drawn the relevant boundary in the wrong place. The question is not whether specific acts of abuse bore a close connection to authorized activities, but whether the employment relationship created the conditions, specifically the trust and access, that made the abuse possible. Without the employment, Griffiths would never have met Randy and Jody. Without his position as Program Director, he would never have established the relationship of trust that led their mother to permit her children to visit his home. The employment was the specific mechanism through which Griffiths gained the credibility and access that enabled everything that followed. The trial judge found explicitly “that the cultivation of his victims by Griffiths took place on Club premises during Club working hours and that without that special relationship and the cultivation that took place, the actual acts would not have taken place.”

The Dissent’s Second Argument: The Club Mandated Intimacy

The dissent challenged the majority’s characterization of mentoring as free of structural intimacy. McLachlin J. argued that the Club went further than merely encouraging rapport with a role model; it “positively encouraged an intimate relationship to develop between Griffiths and his young charges.” The risk associated with this position of trust was exacerbated by the troubled and vulnerable nature of many of the Club’s clients. The Boys’ and Girls’ Club took as its function the goal of “behaviour guidance and to promote the health, social, education, vocational and character development of boys and girls,” a mandate that inherently involved cultivating emotional relationships with vulnerable young people and introduced the risks associated with such relationships.

The Dissent’s Third Argument: Location Is Not Determinative

McLachlin J. pressed a specific argument about the significance of where the abuse occurred. The reason the abuse happened at Griffiths’ home was precisely that he had successfully groomed Randy and Jody to trust him to the point where their mother would allow her children to visit him privately. That grooming occurred through and because of the employment. The dissent formulated this point in its most direct form at paragraph 21:

“It is not the mere coincidence of location and interaction that led Griffiths to prey upon his victims; it is rather that he worked at a job where he was put in a special position of trust and power over particularly vulnerable people and used that position to carry out an abuse of the power with which he was conferred to carry out his duties. It is this considerably stronger connection that justifies the Club being held liable to bear the costs of the losses inflicted by Griffiths.”

What the 4-3 Split Means

The three-justice dissent in Jacobi is not a minor footnote. When the justice who authored the governing enterprise risk test writes the dissent from its application, and is joined by two colleagues, that dissent represents a serious and sustained alternative legal position. The Jacobi majority established where the current law places the outer boundary of enterprise risk liability. The Jacobi dissent describes a world in which that boundary sits further out, in which the creation of any employment-enabled position of trust over vulnerable people carries institutional liability for the misuse of that trust.

The law currently follows the majority. But the 4-3 margin is a reminder that the line between Bazley and Jacobi is genuinely contested, and that cases arising in the territory between the two, where the employment provided more than casual access but less than total residential authority, will continue to be fought at the boundary the dissent would have drawn differently.

What Jacobi v Griffiths Establishes: Five Propositions

Proposition One: Employment-Provided Opportunity Alone Is Not Enough

Almost every employment arrangement provides some opportunity for misconduct. The fact that employment provided the opportunity for a predator to meet their victims is a necessary but not sufficient condition for vicarious liability. Something more, specifically the creation by the enterprise of conditions that made the harm materially more likely, must be shown. As Binnie J. quoted from the Bazley framework: “there must be a strong connection between what the employer was asking the employee to do (the risk created by the employer’s enterprise) and the wrongful act. It must be possible to say that the employer significantly increased the risk of the harm by putting the employee in his or her position and requiring him to perform the assigned tasks.”

Proposition Two: Mentoring and Role-Model Roles Do Not Inherently Create Enterprise Risk

The majority’s explicit statement that being a positive role model does not inherently create enterprise risk, that “mentoring, as such” does not place an organization on a slope toward no-fault liability, is one of the most practically significant holdings in Jacobi. It establishes that recreational organizations, youth sports coaches, community mentors, after-school program directors, and similar figures do not automatically expose their employing organizations to vicarious liability for sexual misconduct simply by virtue of the trust-building their roles require. Something more, the specific conditions of physical intimacy, total authority, or residential custody present in Bazley, must be shown.

Proposition Three: Location and Timing Are Relevant But Not Conclusive

Jacobi confirms that where and when the tortious acts occurred matters to the sufficient connection analysis but does not determine it. Consistently off-site, after-hours conduct in circumstances where the employment conferred no specific authority in the private sphere is a significant factor weighing against the required connection, but is not automatically disconnected from the employment relationship if the employment was the mechanism through which the predator gained the access and trust that the off-site abuse exploited.

Proposition Four: The Sufficient Connection Test Requires Qualitative Assessment, Not Category-Matching

Jacobi demonstrates that applying the sufficient connection test requires genuine qualitative assessment of the specific enterprise design, the specific role the employee held, the specific power and intimacy that role involved, and the specific relationship between those features and the harm. No two cases are automatically on the same side of the line simply because they involve similar actors. A recreational program director and a residential care worker both work with children, but the enterprise each serves, and the conditions each creates, are structurally different in the ways that matter to the Bazley analysis.

Proposition Five: The Nature of the Organization Is a Legitimate Policy Consideration

While non-profit status does not confer immunity from vicarious liability, the nature of the defendant organization (its capacity to absorb and price risk, its ability to continue operating if no-fault liability is broadly applied, its function in providing community benefit) is a legitimate consideration in the policy analysis the Bazley framework explicitly incorporates. Organizations providing charitable community services on non-commercial terms occupy a different position in the policy landscape than commercial enterprises, and the enterprise risk test can accommodate that difference without creating categorical exemptions.

The Legacy: The Bazley-Jacobi Spectrum in Practice

Together, Bazley v Curry and Jacobi v Griffiths mark two points on a spectrum. Residential care facilities mandating intimate parental substitute care of vulnerable children: vicarious liability (Bazley). After-school recreational clubs whose program director organized activities and was encouraged to be a positive role model: no vicarious liability (Jacobi). The legal questions that matter in practice arise in the territory between these two poles: partial residential care, overnight programs, day camps, therapeutic recreational programs, counselling within after-school settings, foster care arrangements, and a range of other institutional configurations that borrow features from both cases.

Canadian courts applying Jacobi in subsequent cases have returned consistently to the same fundamental question Bazley requires: did this institution design a role that materially increased the risk of the harm that occurred? Where the institutional design created conditions of sustained intimate authority, approaching the Bazley model, the Jacobi outcome tends not to apply. Where the employment provided general access rather than specific intimate authority, approaching the Jacobi model, vicarious liability is less readily established.

The Deeper Significance: Two Children, a Divided Court, and the Limits of No-Fault Liability

It would be easy, reading Jacobi as a legal document, to lose sight of the people at its centre. Jody and Randy were children who were abused by an adult in a position of trust. The legal question was whether the organization that employed him and encouraged them to trust him should bear financial responsibility for what he did to them. Three Supreme Court justices said yes. Four said no. Harry Griffiths was jailed for six years. The Boys’ and Girls’ Club of Vernon was found not vicariously liable, though the matter was remitted for a determination of whether the Club bore direct liability for its own fault (negligence, breach of fiduciary duty, or otherwise) in respect of what Griffiths had done to the children in its care.

The majority’s conclusion did not mean the Club had no obligations or that the abuse was unconnected to any failure of institutional care. It meant only that the specific doctrine of vicarious liability, no-fault institutional responsibility for employee misconduct, was not established on these facts. The Club might still be directly negligent; that question remained. But the doctrine that would have made it responsible without fault, simply by virtue of the enterprise it had created and the role it had given Griffiths, did not reach these circumstances.

The dissent’s view, that the enterprise had put Griffiths in a position of trust that materially enhanced the risk of harm and that the Club should therefore bear the consequences, reflects a different moral and legal intuition about institutional accountability. It is an intuition that three sitting Supreme Court justices found persuasive. The fact that the majority did not extinguish the argument. It marks where, on the specific facts of 1982 Vernon, British Columbia, the current legal boundary sits.

Quick Reference: Jacobi v Griffiths

Case Details

Citation: Jacobi v Griffiths, 1999 CanLII 693 (SCC), [1999] 2 SCR 570
CanLII: https://canlii.ca/t/1fqlp | File No.: 26041
Decided: June 17, 1999 (same day as Bazley v Curry) | On appeal from: Court of Appeal for British Columbia
Present: L’Heureux-Dubé, Cory, McLachlin, Iacobucci, Major, Bastarache and Binnie JJ.
Majority (4): Binnie J. (with Cory, Iacobucci and Major JJ.)
Dissent (3): McLachlin J. (with L’Heureux-Dubé and Bastarache JJ.)
Outcome: Appeal dismissed; Club not vicariously liable; matter remitted for determination of direct negligence and breach of fiduciary duty

The Parties

Appellants: Randal Craig Jacobi and Jody Marlane Saur (siblings; Randy aged 11, Jody aged 13 at time of events in 1982)
Respondents: Boys’ and Girls’ Club of Vernon (non-profit, recreational organization) and Harry Charles Griffiths (Program Director 1980–1992)
Individual wrongdoer: Harry Charles Griffiths, who pleaded guilty to 14 counts of sexual assault; jailed for six years
Interveners: The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops; Wunnumin Lake First Nation

Key Facts That Distinguished This Case from Bazley v Curry

The Club was a recreational facility, not a residential care setting; children came for activities and went home to their families after each session
Griffiths organized recreational programs; he was NOT authorized to provide intimate physical care, bedtime routines, or parental substitute care
The Club encouraged Griffiths to develop positive rapport with children; it did NOT mandate custodial intimacy or parental authority over them
Almost all assaults occurred at Griffiths’ private home, after hours, with parental permission; the visits were understood as personal, not employment-related
One incident (sexual touching of Jody in the Club van during a Club-related sporting trip) had closer employment connection; Newbury J.A. at the BCCA would have found liability for that incident alone
Disclosure came approximately ten years after the events
The Club had no authority over the children beyond Club activities; children went home to their parents every day

Why the Majority Found No Vicarious Liability (Binnie J.)

The Club provided access to children generally but did not create the specific conditions of intimate authority, physical custody, or residential power that characterize the Bazley enterprise risk
There was no job-created authority for Griffiths to involve himself in the private lives of the children or their families
Mentoring and role-model functions do not inherently create enterprise risk; positive role modelling is not the same as intimate custodial care
The power Griffiths used to perpetrate his crimes was neither conferred by the Club nor characteristic of the type of enterprise the Club put into the community; it was created by his own personal manipulation
The assaults flowed from personal grooming conducted outside and beyond the employment relationship; the chain of events from employment to assault required multiple independent initiatives by Griffiths for personal gratification
It is not enough to postulate a series of steps each of which might not have happened “but for” the previous steps; the ultimate misconduct must be the product of enterprise-created risk, not independent personal initiative

Why the Dissent Would Have Found Vicarious Liability (McLachlin J.)

Without the employment, Griffiths would never have met the children or established the trust that enabled the abuse; the employment was the necessary mechanism, not merely background context
The Club’s mandate to provide “behaviour guidance” and promote character development required Griffiths to cultivate a trusting and intimate relationship with his young charges, not merely casual rapport, and the Club thereby introduced the risks associated with such relationships
The location of the abuse (at Griffiths’ home) was itself a product of the trust his employment relationship had enabled; location cannot be used to break the connection that the employment relationship created
The trial judge’s findings established that “the cultivation of his victims by Griffiths took place on Club premises during Club working hours and that without that special relationship and the cultivation that took place, the actual acts would not have taken place”
Both policy rationales from Bazley, compensation and deterrence, supported liability; the Club introduced Griffiths to the community’s vulnerable children and clothed him with special responsibilities over them

The Five Propositions Jacobi Establishes

Employment-provided opportunity to meet and interact with vulnerable people is necessary but not sufficient for vicarious liability; the enterprise must materially increase the risk, not merely provide background context
Mentoring, role-model, and recreational leadership roles do not inherently create enterprise risk; something more specific to the Bazley conditions (custodial authority, residential intimacy, comprehensive parental power) is required
Location and timing of tortious acts are relevant but not determinative; the question is whether the enterprise specifically created the risk, not simply where the harm materialized
Non-profit and community-benefit organizations bear no categorical exemption from vicarious liability, but their nature is a legitimate policy consideration in the enterprise risk analysis
The companion case to Bazley v Curry, read together with Bazley, establishes the spectrum within which Canadian institutional vicarious liability for employee sexual misconduct currently operates

Join the conversation Cancel reply

Back to Case Law