City asks court to throw out $10M lawsuit

The City of Ottawa says it wasn’t reckless in its operation of a Barrhaven hill where a man claimed he received life-altering injuries in a head-on sledding crash.

The city’s statement of defence and counterclaim, which lawyers filed in court Aug. 15, says Jonathan Luigi Aiello was old enough to know the risks of sledding at Stonecrest Park on Dec. 26, 2007.

“At all material times, Ottawa did not create any danger with the deliberate intent of causing injury to any user of the sledding hills at Stonecrest Park and did not act with reckless disregard to the presence of sledders,” the city’s statement of defence says.

In a $10-million lawsuit filed last May, Aiello and his family claim the city was negligent in a crash that caused the now 21-year-old man to be seriously injured.

The allegations in the lawsuit and statement of defence haven’t been tested in court.

There are two unsupervised hills facing each other at the park. According to Aiello’s lawsuit, he was sledding down the west hill headfirst on a “traditional foam toboggan” when he collided with a girl sledding feet-first on a wooden toboggan on the east hill. The girl’s momentum pushed her up the west hill and Aiello’s head smashed into the wooden toboggan,

Ottawa did not create any danger with the deliberate intent of causing injury to any user of the sledding hills.

the lawsuit says.

Aiello had a traumatic brain injury and he still has chronic pain, the lawsuit says.

However, the city claims Aiello was negligent in the manner by which he was sledding down the hill and his family was negligent for not making sure he was sledding safely at the park.

The city says it inspected both hills at the park and determined they were “reasonably safe for sledding activity, conducted reasonably.”

There is advice on the city’s website promoting safe sledding and there are signs with similar information at the hills, the statement of defence says.

Stonecrest Park is listed as one of the city’s approved sledding hills.

The $10 million in damages claimed by Aiello and his family are “excessive and too remote to be recoverable in law,” the city’s statement of defence says.

The city also argues too much time has passed and that it has been prejudiced by the delay in time it took to file the lawsuit.

The city’s counterclaim calls for the family to pay the city’s legal costs related to the case.