Law:

Section:

(a) Tort---.------.----Negligence---.---Mental injury---.---Recovery of compensation for mental injury caused by defendant's negligence---.---Pre-requisites---.---Recovery for mental injury in negligence law depended upon the claimant satisfying the criteria applicable to any successful action in negligence; a duty of care, a breach, damage, and a legal and factual causal relationship between the breach and the damage---.---Negligence law (of Canada) recognized that a duty existed at common law to take reasonable care to avoid causing foreseeable mental injury, and that this cause of action protected a right to be free from negligent interference with one's mental health---.---Said right was grounded in the simple truth that a person's mental health ï-­ like a person's physical integrity or property, injury to which was also compensable in negligence law ï-­ was an essential means by which that person choose to live life and pursue goals---.---Where mental injury was negligently inflicted, a person's autonomy to make those choices was undeniably impaired , sometimes to an even greater degree than the impairment which followed a serious physical injury---.---Ordinary duty of care analysis was therefore to be applied to claims for negligently caused mental injury---.---Particularly, liability for mental injury must be confined to claims which satisfy the proximity analysis within the duty of care framework and the remoteness inquiry, which asked whether the harm was too unrelated to the wrongful conduct to hold the defendant fairly liable.Mustapha v. Culligan of Canada Ltd., 2008 SCC 27, [2008] 2 S.C.R. 114; A. Ripstein, Private Wrongs (2016), at pp. 87 and 252-53 and Bourhill v. Young [1943] A.C. 92 (H.L.), at p. 103 ref.(b) Tort---.------.----Negligence---.---Mental injury---.---Recovery of compensation for mental injury caused by defendant's negligence---.---Question as to whether the claimant had to prove a recognized "psychiatric injury"---.---Finding of legally compensable mental injury need not rest, in whole or in part, on the claimant proving a recognized psychiatric injury---.---Law of negligence accorded identical treatment to mental and physical…