Legally Speaking with Michael Mulligan
Legally Speaking with Michael Mulligan
Trump Tarriff Legal Response, Lottery Litigation & Fake Nurse Sentenced
Unlock the hidden power of intellectual property in global trade as we explore Canada's strategic maneuvers against US policies. Instead of traditional tariffs, imagine the impact of restricting US intellectual property rights on Canadian soil. Get ready to dissect a thrilling legal case over a $2 million lottery ticket—is it a solo jackpot or a group windfall? We unravel the details, from the tangled web of evidence to the burden of proof that could make or break the case.
But the intrigue doesn't stop there. Brace yourself for the shocking story of a woman masquerading as a nurse in British Columbia, jeopardizing public trust with her deceitful actions. We'll navigate the legal complexities of her sentencing and the broader implications for the healthcare system. Plus, Michael Mulligan from Mulligan Defense Lawyers joins us to shed light on a school embroiled in a legal battle over a weed gummy incident, offering insights into the delicate handling of the situation. This episode promises a gripping journey through the multifaceted world of law and its profound consequences.
Follow this link for a transcript of the show and links to the cases discussed.
It's time for our regular segment, joined as always by barrister and solicitor with Mulligan Defense Lawyers. Morning, michael Mulligan, with Legally Speaking how you doing. Hey, good morning, I'm doing great. Always good to be here and before we get underway today I just wanted to pass on. I've been getting a lot of good feedback about those ideas that you broached in terms of potential retaliatory tariffs or actions that Canada could take with respect to intellectual property. I saw you have that post up on X that's making the rounds, getting lots of great feedback, so I wanted to say thank you for that again.
Michael Mulligan:Well, that's good.
Michael Mulligan:I hope the people making decisions about that are listening.
Michael Mulligan:I don't think we're bringing the US to its knees by putting tariffs on orange juice or trying to cut off our maple syrup deliveries or something, whereas restricting US intellectual property rights in Canada would be just completely devastating to them, and it also formed one of the core tenets of the free trade agreements we've had with the US over the years.
Michael Mulligan:That's actually part of the agreement that we reached with them to increase US patent protections in Canada, and if they are going to repudiate the deal with us, that seems like a completely natural response to at the very least return things to where they were or go further in that direction.
Michael Mulligan:And I do think if that approach is taken, you're going to immediately snap to attention huge parts of the US economy that are desperately reliant on other countries enforcing US patents and intellectual property rights. I'm going to put great pressure on the US administration to end that, lest their businesses be worth literally nothing. You'll be able to erect your own Trump Tower if you wish, or make yourself a Tesla if you so choose, and you can just imagine how unpopular those things might be. So it seems like an excellent lever for Canada or other small countries to pull and of course, it's a lever which has literally worked with the US on more than one occasion to devastating effect. So hopefully the people in charge of making those decisions are listening carefully and they don't think we're going to get there dealing with orange juice or maple syrup.
Adam Stirling:Indeed. For the moment, though, you and I, as we dive into today's agenda up, first, perhaps appropriately, a $2 million lottery win, Was it a group ticket or not?
Michael Mulligan:Yeah, I think this is just a great case.
Michael Mulligan:As the judge points out, ordinarily a lottery win should be a very happy event, and this was a big lottery win. This was a fellow who worked at a warehouse on the lower mainland, who was a short-haul trucker, and the BC-49 ticket came in to the tune of $2 million. That would ordinarily be a very, very happy event. Instead, it wound up in litigation, and the litigation ensued because of a disagreement with the other people he worked with there about whether the ticket was purchased as a group ticket or whether he purchased it himself, and so it's a really interesting case in that regard. The evidence came out there was indeed a group of people who worked in the warehouse who would, from time to time, purchase group lottery tickets and pool their money to do so. How exactly that worked, the evidence differed. There was, as I guess with many of these things, no written agreement kept, and the process of what happened was irregular and varied from time to time, and so the case really turned on. You know, have the other people who worked in the warehouse who are alleging that they all deserve a share of the $2 million? Have they established that this was a group purchased ticket and when you sue somebody, the person or people doing the suing have the burden of proof, unlike in a criminal case where you've got to prove something beyond all reasonable doubt. In a civil case, when you're suing for money, the standard of proof is on a balance of probabilities, but the burden of proof remains on the people that are making the claim to try to establish that what they're claiming happened, at least probably. And in this case there was evidence and everyone agreed that there was this group of five people who did from time to time pool their money to buy tickets. The people doing the suing the other people who alleged that this ticket was a group ticket, became suspicious in part because after the $2 million win, the fellow who bought the ticket didn't tell anyone else about the win. The fellow who bought the ticket didn't tell anyone else about the win. They found out I guess there's a picture of him with one of those comically oversized checks on the PC lottery website or whatnot, right Interesting. And so they became suspicious hey, why didn't he tell us? And the judge found that they may well have legitimately thought that they had an interest in a portion of the money.
Michael Mulligan:Now, part of the challenge here was what happened with this group of people was completely irregular and generally undocumented. Sometimes some person would buy tickets, other times another person in the group would buy tickets. There was nobody clearly defined who would do it. There were, however, records of this group WhatsApp messaging group, where there were photos circulated on a number of occasions showing the lottery tickets that were purchased in common, and there were 16 photos of that kind. Now the people doing the suing the other warehouse workers claimed that well, this was a regular thing. It occurred all the time. It was $50. Different people would buy it. If you didn't have your money right away, somebody else would cover for you and put it in. Now, all the people doing the suing also agreed that the winner, the guy who bought the ticket, also had a habit of personally buying lottery tickets. So that was a confounding factor.
Michael Mulligan:Now, some of the interesting evidence included that at the time the lottery ticket was purchased, it was purchased from a Chevron station. There were records from BC Lottery Corporation showing that within the one minute this ticket was sold, a total of only $12 in tickets were purchased, and the debit card of the man who purchased it spent $10 at the Chevron at exactly that time. That was important because that's not $50, right, and so there would be some evidence. Well, this wasn't a group purchase, it's only 10 bucks. And there were no pictures of the ticket or this ticket sent out.
Michael Mulligan:The other problem for the group who were doing the suing is that evidence from the person who claimed that he had collected money from the others and given it to the man who bought the ticket just kept changing every time he was asked about it. The first time he swore an affidavit about it, saying that he gave the money to the ticket purchaser at a meeting that morning. Then he later found out that the fellow wasn't at that meeting, so then he changed his story to. Well, he gave him the money after the meeting, but then it changed again to have been given to him on some other occasion. And ultimately the judge found that that person's evidence was just unreliable. And the reasons that he gave for these ever-shifting versions of events included a claim that he was feeling pressured to act quickly. And his other explanation for the changing of claims was that his father was diagnosed with a serious illness. And the judge didn't find that any of those things alleviated his concerns about this changing version of events. And at the end of the day bear in mind what I said at the outset when you're suing somebody, you've got the burden of proving it right.
Michael Mulligan:And ultimately the judge concluded that look, just that shifting evidence about how this money might have been passed along was just not reliable. It couldn't be relied upon and really the history of what was going on here was all over the place. Sometimes one person would buy tickets, sometimes another person would buy tickets. There was no consistent pattern. That combined with the fact that the amount of tickets purchased didn't correspond with any routine amount it was $10 or $12. It was a little hard to figure out why the two amounts didn't quite line up, but it certainly wasn't $50.
Michael Mulligan:Given all of that, the judge concluded that even though the people may have been suspicious because the fellow who won didn't tell them about it and they may have been legitimately have a suspicion, suspicion is not enough. And just on that fact pattern, with no agreement, no photographs, no clear evidence about money being given, it just wasn't enough to establish on a balance of probabilities that this ticket was purchased by this man for the group or that he had somehow failed to purchase group tickets. That was the other claim that you know if he didn't, the money wasn't used to purchase it. He had failed to do it. It just wasn't clear and didn't get up to the level of probably, and so I guess at the end of the day, the short-haul truck driver keeps the $2 million and the other people are presumably still working at the warehouse. So that's the end of the $2 million lottery ticket win and what you need to do if you want to prove that you deserve a share of the prize Michael Mulligan, with Mulligan Defence Lawyers.
Adam Stirling:Legally Speaking will continue right after this. Legally speaking, as we continue on CFAX 1070 with Michael Mulligan, Mulligan Defense Lawyers. Michael, on to our next story a seven-year jail sentence for repeatedly pretending to be a nurse, including in Victoria.
Michael Mulligan:This is a bad case. The profile of the person in this case she was 52 years of age at the time of sentencing, just sentenced recently, just sentenced recently and she's somebody who had 67 prior convictions as an adult for crimes involving fraud and dishonesty, including 18 fraud convictions. She was released on parole and came to BC while on parole and then swiftly resumed her fraudulent activity. The fraudulent activity most unfortunately involved in many instances using the identity of another person who was in fact a nurse to gain employment. She started that by actually getting employment here, or employment in BC at least, at a dental office, not originally doing nursing, but at the dental office. She defrauded the dentist of $8,000, stealing and signing checks. But she moved on again using this fake identity of a real nurse who was on leave at the time, and she created various forged documents and forged credentials, in some cases allowing, when things were checked, people to check the like. They would wind up speaking to the real person, but this wasn't the real person applying for the job. It was somebody who was in fact on leave and in other cases she just modified the emails and telephone numbers. So when people were checking information, she was responding saying what a wonderful nurse she was, and so by that process she wound up getting various nursing positions, some of which were concurrent, including at the Vancouver Women's Hospital, where she was in fact working for some period of time as a nurse, doing various things, including working and dealing with patients who are coming out of anesthetic, giving them pain medication, fentanyl and other things, all apparently as directed by doctors.
Michael Mulligan:She also wound up getting employment in Victoria at a private surgery center in Victoria while she was still employed by the BC Women's Hospital, and so all of this eventually unwound, in part because of what appears to be as I must say with some amusement a lack of professionalism, given of course she wasn't a professional her poor nursing skills probably because she wasn't a nurse and her bedside manner, and so there were various complaints and friction and so on in her efforts doing these things that eventually led all of this to unwind, in her efforts doing these things that eventually led all of this to unwind and the charges she wound up with.
Michael Mulligan:She wound up with charges and she'd also engaged in similar conduct in Ontario. She wound up being convicted, first in Ontario and was sentenced to seven years in prison for similarly using this fake identity to work as a nurse, and then she wound up with the series of charges in British Columbia, including the ones from Vancouver, the BC Women's Hospital there and the dentist's office and the private surgery centre in Victoria, and all of this then led to well, how was she to be sentenced right? And one of the things which was an issue there is whether the sort of how the judge is to come to the total number of years to sentence this woman to, I should say as well. The sentencing process is clear from the decision was confounded by virtue of the fact that the woman is obviously just a as you might have gathered from the description a complete and pathological liar, and so various representations and things that she would claim were just not true.
Michael Mulligan:You know like things, like you know when she would get arrested she'd say, oh, I'm going to pick up my granddaughter. Well, there was no granddaughter right or various sets of things. Oh, I had nursing training for two years but then previously claimed it was a different length of time, judge Fowler, just nothing. It could be relied on anything. Virtually. She was saying, like she said during a pre-sentence report, she was wanting to resume hairdressing with her best friend. They contacted the best friend who said well, he met her in a minimum security prison and has very little contact with her and no idea where she is or what's going on. Virtually everything out of her mouth is just completely false. So a terrible fact pattern and dangerous, as the judge pointed out. Well, you know, generally people weren't physically harmed by what she was doing, although it sounds like there is some botched efforts to insert needles and so on. Many of the people involved in it are naturally, of course, very upset and terrified and so on and sort of have now a lack of faith in, you know, the medical system. Is that person a nurse? Is that person a doctor? You just imagine what that would feel like if you found out that while you were under anesthetic, some fraud artist from Ontario was injecting you with fentanyl. You can imagine that being a pretty upsetting fact pattern, and indeed it was for many of the people.
Michael Mulligan:But the judge had to deal with this issue of whether the sentences for this were all these offenses right, sort of, because at various you should be charged with things like personation with a weapon. Was the injecting people with a needle? And the theory there is that the people did not implicitly consent to a non-nurse injecting them with things and so that was an assault. She played guilty to that. But one of the issues is, when you're sentencing somebody for all this litany of things, should the judge impose a sentence for each one of those things separately and add them all up? That would be sentences which would be consecutive, like should you say, okay, well, how much of a sentence for that injection with the needle when you weren't a nurse? Should that be okay? Should we add five months for that? And then should we add another five months on to using that forged document and add it all up? Or should the judge be imposing concurrent sentences, like sentences run at the same time? And one of the considerations there is really sort of whether the starting point would be are you dealing with sort of one illegal act that has various crimes associated with it, like, let's say, for example, somebody is charged with robbery of a bank and they're also charged with having an unregistered firearm and they're also charged with having an unregistered firearm and also driving dangerously if they sped away from the bank and also assault for pushing down the security guard. Right, you might say, well, those aren't a bunch of discrete things, that we should just give small sentences to each one and add them up.
Michael Mulligan:The approach generally taken there would be to impose concurrent sentences to figure out what is the total appropriate sentence for all this illegal stuff, because really it's all one big transaction. You push down the security guard, you shouldn't have the gun, you robbed the bank and you drove too fast when you drove away. Right, rather than kind of parsing those out as separate things, the Crown's argument was well, these are separate because some were in Victoria, some were in Vancouver, other things happened back in Ontario. The dentist's office is different. They occurred on different days. It wasn't like the bank robbery example. On the other hand, the other approach to it would be well, no, this was just a fraud artist engaged in this fraud of pretending to be a nurse to get money right. Yeah, this was just one conglomeration of fraud. That's the approach ultimately the judge took, and it doesn't necessarily mean that the sentence would be less.
Michael Mulligan:And one of the overarching principles that a judge has to consider is this concept of the principle of totality, like what is the total appropriate sentence for this conduct? You robbed a bank, you drove too fast, you had a gun you shouldn't have had and you shoved the guy down. The total sentence should capture all of that right. Rather than just mathematically adding up what might be an appropriate sentence for pushing somebody and what might be an appropriate sentence for driving too fast, you've got to take the whole thing into consideration, and so that's ultimately what the judge did. The judge concluded that there should be sentences which would run concurrently with each other, but the appropriate total penalty here was a sentence of seven years in the penitentiary and interestingly, that will run concurrently with the Ontario seven-year sentence. That's also what she got there. She had served. It looks like about four years of the or three years of that sentence and the effect of it, the effect of the additional seven years, will be four more years from the seven she got in Ontario. So the net effect of it will be seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven years. That will be the real effect of it. And so that's the ultimate conclusion.
Michael Mulligan:And I should say, boy, what a challenging thing to deal with. It doesn't look like people here were sort of negligent, in the sense that people were checking references and so on. Also, the case had a devastating impact on the real nurse, the real nurse involved in all of this, because her effective reputation was so damaged because now she's been identified as this person who's fraud artist. Basically she's had to change her name because her real name was so sullied by the activity of this woman that she couldn't carry on with it. So it had a real impact on her as well. So just a trail of destruction by this person.
Michael Mulligan:And I must say, for some of us in the criminal justice system sometimes these fraud cases are really challenging to deal with, as became apparent here, because virtually everything out of this person's mouth was untrue, right, her background, her friends, what she did, everything completely untrue, challenging to sort out. You know how that person is to be dealt with, but I guess we can all have some confidence that at least for a number of years seven years she's going to be either in a federal penitentiary or she gets out on parole. No doubt her desire to get out on parole is going to be impacted by virtually the fact that she was on parole at the time. She committed many of these offenses, and so she will find yourself spending a very good portion of that seven years in prison, and so at least the public will be protected for that length of time against her giving you an injection when you're coming out of anesthetic at the hospital. So that's the latest sentencing for the fake nurse.
Adam Stirling:Three minutes left Litigation over weed gummies and email messages.
Michael Mulligan:This one made me smile. This is a case that's over the West Shore. The fact pattern is very unfortunate. It was a group of kids going on a trip to the forest for school and apparently the grade 8 kids, and apparently one of them brought some what was described as weed gummies and gave them to some other classmates who ate them. Teachers found out about it. There was.
Michael Mulligan:Ultimately, there is disputable whether the weed gummies quote unquote were weed gummies containing CBD or THC THC being like the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, cbd apparently being something that some people give to like their pets and eat for other medical reasons, and so there are different things. The litigation stems from the fact that the school sent a bunch of emails to all of the parents claiming that these kids were involved with quote prohibited substances close quote which may or may not have been accurate, depending on what in fact was in these gummies. One of the kids wound up being expelled, two others wound up being disciplined, and the family on behalf of the kid who was expelled, who apparently received to eat one of the weed gummies whatever that might actually have been is suing the school for things including defamation, claiming that these email messages sent out to all the parents alleging that he'd been involved with quote prohibited substances was damaging to his reputation. Presumably, that turns on whether these things contained CBD or THC and whether in fact they were prohibited. All of this is now leading to litigation, long examinations for discoveries and the most the current part of it decision that came out was a decision seeking to order the school to provide the names, contact information for all of the parents that they emailed on these various occasions making these claims. The school didn't want to provide that. They resisted it, so off it went to sort of a chambers application. Ultimately, the school's been ordered to do that. The entire thing.
Michael Mulligan:I must say, as I read it, it caused me to sort of smile at the weed gummy grade eight student problem. But, as the judge who made this decision pointed out, you know, really encouraging that the parties try to avoid unnecessary chambers applications and so on, because we've turned some reading students eating some gummies that may or may not have contained THC in them into a circumstance where one of them's been expelled. Emails have been sent out, all about them, and now they're involved in lengthy and complicated litigation in the Supreme Court, all of which is extremely unfortunate. Lengthy and complicated litigation in the Supreme Court, all of which is extremely unfortunate. You would have hoped that back when the weed gummy incident got detected, there might have been a more sensitive way to deal with it than there was. But there we are and we will continue to, I guess, watch what happens with the litigation between the school and the former grade 8 student who may or may not have eaten a weed gummy.
Adam Stirling:So that's the latest of that, michael Mulligan, with Mulligan Defense Lawyers, legally speaking, during the second half of our second hour every Thursday on the show. Michael, thank you, pleasure as always. Thank you so much. Have a great day. All right, you too.