Steven Fletcher

Public record

Catastrophic injury compensation and the right to an independent life

Issues & Impact

Steven Fletcher’s own catastrophic injury put him up against the limits of Manitoba’s no-fault insurance. When the courts held that the cap on his care was inadequate but a matter for the legislature rather than the bench, he later became a legislator and moved to change it.

The position

After a catastrophic injury, medicine can save a life. The harder question is who pays for the decades of support that make an independent life possible, and on what terms. Fletcher’s argument, drawn from his own experience, was that a no-fault scheme built to rehabilitate an injured person as much as practical to the level they were at before the accident should not then cap the very support that makes that rehabilitation real.1

The origin

Fletcher was a geological engineer working in northern Manitoba when a 1996 car accident left him a C-4 quadriplegic. The care system offered him a place in an institution. He refused it, and pursued a self-managed care arrangement that let him live in his own apartment, finish an MBA, and enter public life, over Manitoba Public Insurance’s initial doubt that any of it was possible.2

They literally wanted to put me in an institution, like Deer Lodge and Taché. No, thank you.

Steven Fletcher, interview, Manitoba Law Journal, vol. 46(2)2

The scheme carried its own disincentives. Income he earned, or benefits such as CPP, were clawed back against his income replacement, so building the independent, working life the system said it wanted came at a financial penalty.3

The legal fight

The dispute turned on two provisions of the Manitoba Public Insurance Corporation Act. Section 31 capped personal home assistance at about $3,000 a month. Fletcher argued that section 138, which commits the insurer to rehabilitate an injured person as far as practical toward their pre-accident life and sets no absolute limit, should govern his care, because his real costs, including home and vehicle adaptations, ran well past the cap.4 His counsel was the veteran Manitoba lawyer Sid Green.

The courts did not accept the argument. In 2004 the Manitoba Court of Appeal ruled against him, and the Supreme Court of Canada later declined to hear the matter.5 What makes the loss consequential is the reason the Court of Appeal gave: it agreed the cap was inadequate, but held that raising it was a job for the legislature, not the courts.4

From the courtroom to the legislature

That answer, that the remedy lay with the legislature, is the hinge of the whole story. In 2010 the province amended the MPI Act’s catastrophic-injury provisions through Bill 36.6 Fletcher credits the government of the day for the improvement rather than claiming it as his own. Elected to the Manitoba Legislature in 2016, he found the reform still fell short of what he thought a catastrophic-injury scheme owed, and in 2017 introduced a private member’s bill, Bill 225, to carry it further.7 The bill did not pass, but the arc is the point: a man told by the courts to take his case to the legislature went and took a seat in it.

Contribution, classified
Authorship The 2017 private member’s bill (Bill 225) proposing further amendments to the MPI Act’s catastrophic-injury provisions.
Advocacy From his own case onward, argued that a no-fault scheme promising rehabilitation to the pre-accident level should not cap the support that makes independent living possible.
Influence His litigation put the inadequacy of the care cap on the record, and the Court of Appeal itself called it inadequate. The province later amended the scheme; his case was one prominent example, not the sole cause.
Result No bill of his was enacted. The substantive reform of 2010 (Bill 36) was the government’s, which he credits to the party then in power. His documented result is a body of case law and a sustained legislative record pressing the issue.
Legacy A rare closed loop in his record: told by the courts that the remedy was the legislature’s to grant, he became a legislator to pursue it.

Sources

  1. Manitoba Public Insurance, Personal Injury Protection Plan and catastrophic-injury coverage (scheme background).
  2. “Interview with the Honourable Steven Fletcher,” Manitoba Law Journal, vol. 46(2).
  3. Fletcher v. Automobile Injury Compensation Appeal Commission, 2004 MJ No. 159.
  4. Fletcher v. Manitoba Public Insurance Corp., 2004 MBCA 192 (Manitoba Court of Appeal).
  5. Supreme Court of Canada, applications for leave to appeal denied (mid-2000s).
  6. Manitoba, Bill 36 (2010), amendments to The Manitoba Public Insurance Corporation Act on catastrophic injury.
  7. Manitoba, Bill 225 (2017), private member’s bill introduced by Fletcher on catastrophic-injury care.

These citations are as complete as the record now allows. More will be added as they are found, and these pages change as the facts do. Where a source is a recollection rather than a document, it is identified as such.