A funeral home’s attempt to recover costs incurred during a casket-delivery mix-up at its Burnaby warehouse last October has been denied.
Richmond-based Can-Trust-Funeral Ltd. hired Sunshine Logistics to arrange a container shipment of caskets from China last October, according to a Civil Resolution Tribunal decision posted online last month.
In a small-claims dispute, the funeral home attempted to claim $2,000 in damages, trucking fees and labour costs from the logistics company, alleging it had been late in delivering the caskets to the funeral home’s Metrotown warehouse and that the trucker tasked with delivering them had failed to bring cutters to open the shipping container they were in.
The shipment had to be sent back and delivered again the next day because no one at the warehouse had a cutter to open the container’s bolt seal.
Tribunal vice-chair Shelley Lopez, however, dismissed the funeral home’s claim for damages.
In a June 13 decision, she found the parties’ agreement did not promise a specific delivery time, despite the funeral home’s claim, and that it wasn’t the trucker’s job, according to the contract, to provide a bolt cutter.
