A B.C. court has awarded a homeowner nearly $745,000 in damages following a legal dispute with a contractor accused of delaying her renovation project for a year and a half without completing the work.
Vernon Supreme Court Judge Warren Milman issued a ruling on the dispute dating back to 2018 after the conclusion of a summary trial last week.
Beverly Wanklyn initiated legal action against her previous contractor, Rene Bertrand, and his company, then known as Elite Life & Home Painting & Renovations, according to the Dec. 20 ruling. Wanklyn cited breach of contract and fraudulent misrepresentation by the contractor and his company and claimed the money she had paid was improperly allocated to different projects.
“This action arises from a series of contracts by which the plaintiff, Beverly Jill Wanklyn, hired the defendants to renovate her house,” the court decision reads. “After paying them a total of $771,207.96 and waiting over a year and a half for the work to be done, she finally lost faith in them and hired a different contractor to complete the job.”
Wanklyn lived alone in a lakefront Kelowna home in January 2017 when she first met Bertrand. She was “impressed” by Bertrand’s “demeanour” and “apparent knowledge base and skillset” and subsequently hired him to build a guest suite in her 1924 home, the court decision said.
She paid him roughly $76,000 for the project, which was successfully completed. Wanklyn and Bertrand then discussed renovating the rest of her home and the contractor promised to complete the majority of the work while she took a month-long vacation in Europe from mid-March to mid-April.
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He said she could reside in the guest suite upon her return while he completed the finishing touches on her house. He assured her the remaining work would be complete by the May long weekend, the court ruling said.
Renovation Issues
The renovation included demolition, reconfiguring the layout of the home, replacing the deck, and installing central air conditioning along with a central vacuum system. The contractor also promised to replace the roof, update the plumbing, install a new hot water tank, rewire the entire residence, install new flooring and lighting fixtures, and completely repaint the interior.
Bertrand quoted his client a sum of $379,575 for the work, and he received $327,245 from Wanklyn before she went on vacation, the court heard.
“When she returned from vacation on April 21, 2017 … she was expecting to arrive home to a newly-renovated house,” the ruling reads. “Instead, she was shocked to find that the house had been gutted and progress halted.”
When Wanklyn demanded a refund, Bertrand refused, saying the funds had already been used to acquire the necessary materials for the renovation.
“This appears to have been untrue,” the court said.
Bertrand told his client he had found decay in the wooden support beams of the home and that he had chosen to withhold this information to avoid ruining her holiday. The quotation given by Betrand for the repair of the beams was $50,000, which Wanklyn paid in its entirety.
Instead of getting to work, Bertrand informed his client in July that all of the support beams in the house were rotten and in need of replacement, the court heard. This, Bertrand said, meant he would need to “rebuild part of the house from scratch,” which would include pouring new foundations, and installing new exterior stucco and a new porch at an additional cost of $125,000. He promised the work would be done in two months and Wanklyn provided a bank draft for $93,750.
“As the project languished during the rest of the summer, Mr. Bertrand told Ms. Wanklyn, falsely, that he was awaiting municipal permits,” the court document reads.
He told her in September 2017 the house contained asbestos and work could not commence until the issue was resolved. He also said the solarium windows, the house’s footings and the garage all needed to be replaced, according to the court documents. He gave Wanklyn yet another quote, this time for $102,017.28, and she paid him $76,512.96 that day.
The asbestos abatement work was finalized by a subcontractor in October 2017 but no substantial work was completed afterward, the court heard. That led to her pipes freezing and a subcontractor had to be hired to fix the problem.
Wanklyn paid the contractor an additional $223,700 to complete the project but received only a list of excuses for the halted work between October 2017 and August 2018, according to the court documents.
“In early August 2018, Ms. Wanklyn, now justifiably suspicious about everything Mr. Bertrand had been telling her, demanded to see the defendants’ receipts for the work done to that point,” the decision said. “They refused to provide them.”
Wanklyn demanded a refund without success and officially terminated her contract with Bertrand on Aug. 31, 2018. She was then forced to hire another contractor to complete the work on her home at a cost of $995,025.41, the decision said.
Court Claim
Wanklyn filed a lawsuit in October 2018, but it was not until this year that any substantial efforts were made to resolve the case. Wanklyn filed the current application in June.
Milman said he was “satisfied” the evidence established the defendants’ liability for breach of contract and fraudulent misrepresentation.
“Ms. Wanklyn entrusted the defendants with a significant portion of her net worth, leaving her vulnerable to the kind of abuse of that trust that the defendants engaged in,” the judge wrote. “In addition, I have found that the defendants made fraudulent misrepresentations to induce her to continue paying them. In effect, the defendants lied to her on multiple occasions in an effort to keep her committed to the contract.”
The judge said only $17,363.66 of the money Wanklyn shelled out could be clearly connected to the work done on her home.
Betrand admitted to the court that her payments had been “co-mingled” and allocated to various other projects, including renovations to his personal residence, a situation the judge characterized as “troubling.”
The contractor was ordered to pay Wanklyn $732,362 in damages as compensation for breach of contract and fraudulent misrepresentation, thus returning the amount she had paid for services that were never rendered.
Bertrand and his company were also instructed to pay Wanklyn $10,000 in punitive damages, which is considerably less than the $50,000 she requested.
The judge said he did not award a larger sum because he wasn’t convinced the fraud was initially intentional.
“I am not persuaded that the defendants set out from the beginning to convert Ms. Wanklyn’s payments without ever intending to complete the project,” he wrote. “Rather, it appears that they intended to do the work eventually, but were incapable of properly managing the project or seeing it through to completion.”
