I post on behalf of Steve Sugarman:

If you engage in outrageous conduct that causes severe or extreme emotional distress and your conduct was intended to cause emotional distress or was carried out with reckless disregard for its consequences, it seems to me that you should be liable in tort for the injury you caused. One way to reach that result is to conclude this is a wiser way to state the Canadian tort of IIMS or the US tort of IIED (I would actually favor an even more liberal reformulation but that is for another occasion).. Another is to craft a "new" tort that has modestly different requirements than IIMS (or IIED). The latter seems unwise to me; better would be to liberalize the current IIMS requirements.

The actual case before the Ontario court, however, as the judges saw it, is not one that comes anywhere close to making out a case for liability whichever set of criteria is used. Hence it is the wrong setting for re-shaping the IIMS requirements.

Steve Sugarman

UC Berkeley Law