Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Dispute over whether Urgences-Santé committed a civil fault under article 1457 C.c.Q. by providing erroneous information about the ambulance’s point of departure during the coroner’s public inquiry.
• Central factual issue on causation: whether the 23-minute response time, and the alleged misinformation about where the ambulance started from, could have contributed to or caused Koray Celik’s cardiac and respiratory arrest and death.
• Evidentiary weight of the coroner’s report, which attributes the death primarily to intoxication/adverse reaction in a context of agitated delirium and physical immobilisation during a police intervention, not to ambulance response time.
• Legal argument over recoverability of extrajudicial fees (lawyer’s fees and related Superior Court costs) as damages in a separate small claims action after a discontinuance in the earlier Superior Court proceeding.
• Prescription and timing issues under articles 2925 and 2880 C.c.Q., focused on when the plaintiffs “discovered” the alleged fault (the true departure point of the ambulance) and whether the claim was time-barred.
• Assessment of an “abusive” proceeding under article 51 C.C.P., with the defendant alleging that the small claims action improperly revived the same underlying facts following a voluntary discontinuance in Superior Court.

Background and parties

The case arises from the tragic death of Koray Kevin Celik, a young man who died following a police intervention and emergency medical response in March 2017 at his family home in Île-Bizard, Québec. His parents, Cesur Celik and June Tyler, and his brothers, Tyler and Deniz Celik (collectively, the Celik family), sued Corporation Urgences-Santé, the regional emergency medical service provider, in the Small Claims Division of the Court of Québec. The Celik family claimed $15,000 in damages, alleging that Urgences-Santé provided erroneous information about its ambulance response in connection with a 911 emergency call on 6 March 2017. They argued that this misinformation, discovered only later, caused them moral injury and unnecessary legal expense, and that the ambulance delay itself had contributed to Koray’s death. Urgences-Santé denied any fault and contested both liability and damages.

Chronology of the emergency events

On 6 March 2017, the emergency ambulance service was requested due to the critical condition of Koray at the family residence in Île-Bizard. At that time, Koray was under arrest by officers of the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM). During this intervention, a cardiorespiratory arrest (cardiac and respiratory arrest) was observed. Paramedics from Urgences-Santé provided medical services at the scene, attempted resuscitation, and transported Koray to Hôpital du Sacré-Cœur. He was taken in charge by hospital staff and was later pronounced dead at the hospital, approximately an hour after arrival. The next day’s events (5–6 March 2017) and their immediate aftermath became the subject of multiple legal and investigatory processes, including civil litigation and a coroner’s public inquiry.

Prior Superior Court proceedings and discontinuance

Before the small claims action, the Celik family had already sued Urgences-Santé in the Superior Court of Québec under file number 500-17-111822-204. In that earlier proceeding they alleged substantially the same facts and legal basis, namely that Urgences-Santé’s response to the 911 call, and aspects of the emergency intervention, had led to Koray’s death. That Superior Court case advanced claims arising from the same events of 5–6 March 2017. On 19 December 2024, however, the Celik family filed a formal discontinuance of their Superior Court case under article 213 of the Code of Civil Procedure. The new small claims action was thus launched after the end of the original civil suit and framed specifically around an alleged error in information disclosed during the coroner’s inquiry, and the consequences the family said they suffered from relying on that information.

The coroner’s public inquiry and the ambulance timing issue

A public coroner’s inquiry into Koray’s death was announced around 28 September 2020 and held in October and November 2022, presided over by Me Luc Malouin. The Celik family deliberately chose not to participate or cooperate in that inquiry, as a form of protest against the government’s refusal to provide financial assistance for their involvement. During the coroner’s inquiry, representatives of Urgences-Santé stated that ambulance no. 037, the first vehicle on scene, left the Lakeshore General Hospital and arrived at the Celik residence 23 minutes later. This assertion about the point of departure and transit time became central to the later litigation. Believing this to be accurate, the family personally drove the route between Lakeshore Hospital and their home to verify how long the trip should take over a distance they understood to be about 14 kilometres. They concluded that reaching the house should take less than 23 minutes and inferred that Urgences-Santé had not treated Koray’s situation as a true emergency and had not provided care as quickly as required. The family believed this alleged delay in response time was a contributing cause of his cardiac arrest and death. They also publicly criticized the inquiry process, describing it as a “circus number” of a government trying to mislead the public, and explained that this stance informed their refusal to participate in the coroner’s hearings.

Discovery of the alleged misinformation and its consequences

The new small claims claim does not contest anew the entire emergency sequence but focuses on what the family characterises as a distinct fault: misinformation given by Urgences-Santé about the ambulance’s starting point. On or about 8 April 2024, during an out-of-court examination of paramedic Martin Charpentier in the Superior Court proceedings, the family learned that the ambulance had not actually departed from Lakeshore General Hospital. Instead, it had left from a Tim Hortons outlet on boulevard Fénélon in Dorval, located about 21 kilometres from the Celik residence. This revelation led the family to believe that their earlier understanding—built on the 23-minute time from the hospital—had been based on erroneous information. The Celik family then decided to discontinue their Superior Court action, and subsequently sent a demand letter on 23 December 2024, asserting that Urgences-Santé’s misstatement of the ambulance’s point of departure during the coroner’s inquiry constituted an independent civil fault. They claimed that, had they possessed accurate information at the outset, they would not have pursued the Superior Court proceedings, would not have incurred lawyer’s fees and related costs, and would not have suffered additional moral distress centred on the idea that their son might have been saved had the response been faster. In the small claims action, they sought compensation for both the legal fees they had paid and for moral damages, including pain, anger, frustration, sadness, stress and sleep disturbance linked to the belief that their son’s life might have been spared if his cardiac arrest had been treated as a more urgent emergency.

Findings of the coroner on cause of death

The coroner’s final report on Koray’s death concluded that he died from an intoxication or adverse reaction to a mixture of alcohol, medications and drugs of abuse, in the context of an agitated delirium syndrome. The report further noted that his cardiac hypertrophy may have contributed to the death. The coroner categorised the fatality as occurring during a physical immobilisation in the course of a police intervention. The coroner’s recommendations were directed at the 911 service for the City of Montréal and the École nationale de police du Québec, suggesting they meet to consider establishing a protocol for communicating key information (notably mental state and aggressiveness) to police officers assigned through the 911 system. The report did not attribute the death to ambulance response time or to the precise point of departure of the ambulance, nor did it suggest that Urgences-Santé’s response constituted a primary causal factor.

Defence position: no fault, no causation, no recoverable damages

Urgences-Santé resisted the claim on several legal and factual grounds. First, it maintained that no fault had been committed in the emergency response itself: paramedics had resuscitated Koray at the home, transported him to Hôpital du Sacré-Cœur and delivered him there alive, where he was later pronounced dead under hospital care. Urgences-Santé emphasised that the family had long known the elapsed time between the police call and the ambulance’s arrival, as shown by the call card 170306-0055, which recorded the relevant response times. From this perspective, the key factor in assessing its conduct was the total delay between call and arrival, not the starting point of the ambulance, and the family had always had the essential timing data to decide whether to sue. Second, the defendant argued that earlier incorrect information about the ambulance’s origin stemmed from an error in the computer system, not from any deliberate attempt to mislead or deceive anyone. Accordingly, any misdescription of the starting location was characterised as a technical mistake rather than a wrongful act meeting the threshold of “faute” under article 1457 C.c.Q. Third, Urgences-Santé contended that the plaintiffs’ alleged damages—chiefly their legal fees in the Superior Court and their emotional distress over the mistaken belief that the ambulance delay might have caused Koray’s death—did not flow from the administrative detail of where the ambulance had departed from. Instead, those damages flowed from the underlying tragedy of Koray’s death, for which Urgences-Santé denied civil liability and which had already been litigated in the Superior Court. The defendant also invoked a well-established principle of Québec law: extrajudicial costs, such as lawyer’s fees, are generally not recoverable as civil damages from an opposing party, except in very narrow circumstances. In its view, the family could not sidestep this rule by withdrawing the original Superior Court action and launching a new small claims case framed around the same factual matrix under the guise of a separate “information-fault.”

Prescription and alleged abuse of process

Procedurally, Urgences-Santé also raised prescription and abuse of process. On prescription, it invoked the three-year limitation period for personal actions under article 2925 C.c.Q., arguing that any claim related to the 2017 events was out of time. The Court, however, applied article 2880 C.c.Q. to determine that, in the specific context of the alleged information-fault, prescription began when the plaintiffs first became aware of the supposed fault—namely on 8 April 2024, during the examination of paramedic Charpentier—rather than in 2017. On that reasoning, the claim was not time-barred. The defendant further alleged that the small claims suit was abusive under article 51 of the Code of Civil Procedure, characterising it as a renewed attempt to litigate the same underlying facts that had been the subject of the Superior Court action, which the plaintiffs had themselves discontinued, with legal counsel, on 19 December 2024, eight months after learning of the true point of departure of the ambulance. In Urgences-Santé’s view, the discontinuance followed by new proceedings based on the same events violated the principle of proportionality and amounted to harassment through repetitive litigation.

Court’s analysis of civil fault under article 1457 C.c.Q.

The Court of Québec framed its analysis under article 1457 of the Civil Code of Québec, which sets out the general rule of extra-contractual civil liability. The alleged “faute” in this case was not the emergency response itself, but the transmission of incorrect information about the ambulance’s starting point during the coroner’s inquiry—information later shown to be the product of a computer-system error. The Court classified this as, at most, a light fault or simple omission. Crucially, the judge emphasised that civil liability cannot arise from a fault in the abstract; the fault must be linked by a causal connection to an actual, compensable prejudice. Here, the Court found that the incorrect statement about whether the ambulance had departed from Lakeshore Hospital or from a Tim Hortons in Dorval could not reasonably be considered the cause of the damages claimed. The fundamental cause of Koray’s death, as established by the coroner, was an intoxication or adverse reaction to a combination of alcohol, drugs and medications, in the context of agitated delirium and physical immobilisation during a police intervention. Whether the ambulance left from the hospital or from a Tim Hortons did not change the outcome of his condition; it did not transform the chain of medical and policing events or the medical mechanism of death. The Court explicitly noted that under Québec civil law, a wrongful act does not give rise to liability unless it materialises in prejudice to another person. In this case, the judge concluded that the false indication of the ambulance’s point of departure simply could not be considered the cause of the son’s death or of a separate legally recognised injury.

Burden of proof, causation and damages

The Court reiterated the general burden of proof rules in articles 2803 and 2804 C.c.Q.: a claimant must prove the facts supporting the right alleged, and proof is sufficient where it shows that a fact is more probable than its non-existence, unless the law demands a higher standard. In a damages claim, the plaintiffs must prove: (1) a fault by the defendant; (2) actual damages; and (3) a causal link between that fault and those damages. Applying these requirements, the Court found the plaintiffs had not discharged their evidentiary burden on key elements. Even if the provision of incorrect information about the ambulance’s starting point could be characterised as a minor fault, the plaintiffs did not establish that it caused a distinct, compensable injury separate from the original death and emotional suffering tied to it. The moral damages they described—anger, frustration, sadness, stress and sleep disturbances over the possibility their son could have been saved—were, in the Court’s view, directly tied to the death itself, not to the administrative error about where the ambulance had departed from. Likewise, their legal costs in the Superior Court were not recoverable as damages in these circumstances, particularly given the long-standing principle against recovery of extrajudicial fees, and the fact that they chose to initiate and then discontinue that earlier proceeding.

Outcome and successful party

Ultimately, the Court of Québec concluded that the Celik family had not met their burden of proving, on a balance of probabilities, that Urgences-Santé committed a civil fault that caused them legally compensable damages in the sense required by article 1457 C.c.Q. The judge expressly found that the cause of Koray’s death was not the ambulance’s point of departure or the alleged misinformation about that departure. Accordingly, the Court rejected in full the plaintiffs’ claim for $15,000 in damages. The judgment specifies that the action is dismissed “but without costs,” in light of the sensitive circumstances surrounding the case. As a result, the successful party is Corporation Urgences-Santé, and there is no monetary award or costs ordered in its favour; the total amount granted or ordered in this decision is zero dollars.