In Danielsen v. Johnson, the Plaintiff was in the midst of being cross-examined when he was asked to step down in order to accommodate an expert witness who was ready to testify. Counsel for the Defendant asked that the Plaintiff be excluded from the courtroom during the testimony of the expert witness, and Plaintiff‘s counsel refused. The Court considered the previous Court of Appeal decision is Sisson, with respect to the relevant legal test to be followed. The Court ruled that there would be no “essential of justice” that would be threatened by permitting the Plaintiff to remain in the courtroom.
[2] There is case law that deals with the question of when parties to the proceedings should be excluded, and the leading case seems to be a 1951 case from our court of appeal, Sisson v. Olson, [1951] 1 W.W.R. (N.S.) 507, where the court says this at para. 6 of the judgment of Judge O’Halloran:
But in my judgment, a party to an action (if not dismissed therefrom) cannot escape remaining a party while the action is in progress. It would be plainly unreasonable to attempt, not to say impossible to accomplish, to deprive him of that status at any stage of the proceedings in the action. It must follow, in my judgment, that appellants have as much right to attend each other’s discovery examination as they have to remain in court and listen to each other’s testimony at the trial itself.
[3] And at para. 7:
Acceptance of this conclusion does not deny jurisdiction in the court at the trial or in the presiding judicial official at any stage of the proceedings to order the physical exclusion of a party, should a violation of an essential of justice occur or be threatened, if exclusion is not directed. What may constitute such a violation depends on the situation in each case appraised in its own atmosphere, see Bird v. Vieth (1899) 7 B.C.R. 31.
[4] The defence here argues that we have the situation where there is a threatened violation of an essential of justice. What makes the case at bar different from any of the other cases which I have been referred to is three-fold: one, this is a trial, while the precedents with which I was provided (including Sisson) dealt with an examination for discovery; second, the plaintiff is in the midst of cross-examination; and third, defence counsel has agreed to accommodate plaintiff‘s counsel and, more importantly, a medical witness, by standing down the cross-examination. If he had not agreed to that it could be that the application would be on the other foot and there would be an application to stand down the witness.
[5] Those are important considerations, I agree, but in my view they are not enough to remove the heavy onus which is on the applicant to have the plaintiff excluded, and I rely on the principle as set out in Sisson that parties get to be in the courtroom except in situations where an essential of justice is threatened.