A sentence of 18 months has been handed down to a contractor who was found guilty of manslaughter earlier this year for the death of an employee buried by a collapse during work on a sewer line.
Quebec Court Judge Pierre Dupras delivered his decision, considered to be a precedent in Quebec, on Tuesday at the Montreal courthouse. Sylvain Fournier was also sentenced to two years of probation after the prison term expires. He is the owner of S. Fournier Excavation Inc., which was doing work at a home on 54th Ave. in Lachine on April 3, 2012 when Gilles Lévesque died.
Fournier, who is appealing his manslaughter conviction, did not testify during his sentence hearing.
An expert who testified during Fournier’s trial described several unsafe factors on the job site: the slopes of the excavation were too steep and no system was used to support the sides of the pit to prevent it from collapsing.
In his March 1 decision to convict Fournier, Dupras concluded that by ignoring safety obligations Fournier “demonstrated an unruly recklessness or foolishness toward the security and the life of Mr. Lévesque.” The judge also criticized Fournier as having failed to consider what were “foreseeable consequences” in the lead up to the collapse. Lévesque was completely buried after the trench he was working in collapsed.
Fournier himself was buried to his waist and both of his legs fractured. He was in a coma for two days and hospitalized for nearly two weeks.
Prosecutor Sarah Sylvain-Laporte had requested that Fournier be sentenced to a 42-month prison term but could find no precedent in Quebec law to support the recommendation. The prosecutor noted that Lévesque had worked for Fournier since 2004 without having obtained the competency cards required to do excavation work.
The Crown presented three witnesses when sentence arguments were made, including Lévesque’s daughter, Karine Gallant Lévesque.
“The Court is, naturally, sensitive to the misfortune that afflicted the family of Gilles Lévesque and is aware that nothing can repair this catastrophe. (It) hopes that (his family) can, despite all, find peace and serenity,” Dupras wrote in his nine-page decision. The judge also said the injuries Fournier suffered in the collapse factored into his decision.
Karine Gallant Lévesque at the site of the collapse in Lachine on April 3, 2012, in which her father was killed.
Fournier’s lawyer, Brigitte Martin, argued for a 90-day sentence followed by three years of probation and asked that Fournier be able to serve it on weekends. Fournier was also willing to make a $5,000 donation to a charity and carry out 240 hours of community service. The attorney argued that Fournier has already been stigmatized by the manslaughter conviction.