A driveway scuffle, a punch through a truck door, and a tribunal ruling that once again tells ICBC: explain yourself.
That, in short, is what a British Columbia tribunal decided in a ruling issued April 21, 2026, overturning ICBC's finding that a pickup driver was entirely at fault after a stranger yanked open his door and hit him in the face.
The driver, Andrew Stothard, had been trying to leave his rented property on May 27, 2023, when the day took a sharp turn. His landlord, identified only as RS, planted himself in front of Stothard's Ford F150, trying to hand over a notice about the rental unit's locks. Stothard's truck rolled slowly forward. Then, without warning, RS's brother-in-law - a man Stothard had never met, identified as FK - opened the driver's door and threw a punch.
Stothard hit the gas. According to FK's account to ICBC, the trailer Stothard was towing struck his shoulder, knocked him down, and rolled over his foot, fracturing it. FK was the only person who reported an injury.
ICBC's take on the whole episode was blunt: Stothard was 100 percent responsible. The insurer pointed to section 144 of the Motor Vehicle Act, which says drivers must show reasonable consideration for others on the road.
The Civil Resolution Tribunal was not convinced - not because the law was wrong, but because ICBC never bothered to explain how it applied. The tribunal noted that the insurer did not address FK's role in opening the door and striking Stothard, did not deal with the trailer's contact with either pedestrian, and told Stothard he had a duty "to prove the other party was negligent" without saying where that duty came from. Tribunal Member Micah Carmody wrote that ICBC "assumed Mr. Stothard's negligence and imposed an unfair onus of proof on him."
Then came the more interesting legal turn. Carmody applied the "agony of the moment" principle - the idea, drawn from Graham v. Carson, 2015 BCCA 310, that drivers should not be judged harshly for split-second choices made in an emergency. Courts had not used the doctrine for a near-stationary driver facing a physical assault, but Carmody saw no reason to limit it to highway speeds. Panic is panic. FK's credibility did not help his side either; he never told ICBC he had opened the door and punched the driver.
Stothard, in the end, was found zero percent responsible and awarded $125 in tribunal fees.
For insurers, the ruling lands in familiar territory. It joins a growing string of CRT decisions - De Paras, Singh, Nygaard, Nastalin - chiding ICBC for citing statutes without connecting them to the facts. The takeaway for claims professionals is hard to miss: fault findings need reasons, not just references. And "agony of the moment," once associated with higher-speed emergencies, now has room to stretch.
