VANCOUVER - Vancouver International Airport, where Robert Dziekanski wandered around lost for 10 hours before his fatal confrontation with RCMP two years ago, has denied any responsibility for his death in its defence of a lawsuit filed by the Polish immigrant's mother.
Dziekanski died on the floor of the airport's international arrivals area on Oct. 14, 2007, after four RCMP officers stunned him with a Taser.
His mother is now suing the officers, the airport and the federal and provincial governments.
Zofia Cisowski alleges the airport and its staff failed her son at every encounter they had with the man after he arrived from Poland and then tried, unsuccessfully, to find his waiting mother.
He was lost in the airport for about 10 hours before his confrontation with police.
In particular, Cisowski's lawsuit says airport staff didn't do enough to help Dziekanski when he became agitated and started throwing furniture, prompting calls to police.
She also claims airport officials didn't provide sufficient access to a translator and wrongly decided not to call the facility's own firefighters after Dziekanski was stunned and lying unconscious on the airport floor.
The lawsuit also says staff failed to provide Cisowski, who waited for hours in a public area before going home to Kamloops, B.C., with any "meaningful assistance" when she repeatedly tried to find out where her son was.
The airport denies every allegation.
Airport staff "followed their training, used good judgment and employed the resources available to them at the time to do their best to assist the plaintiff (Cisowski), Mr. Dziekanski and all members of the public in attendance at the airport," says the statement of defence, filed on Nov. 20.
"If the plaintiff sustained any injury or harm, such harm was not foreseeable by the airport or its representatives."
Cisowski's lawyer declined to comment, saying he was waiting for statements of defence from the others named in the lawsuit. The airport is the only defendant so far to file such a statement.
Officials with the airport couldn't be reached for comment.
The airport faced intense criticism after Dziekanski's death and made numerous changes in the aftermath, including improved access to translation services, more signs in different languages and increased patrols to find passengers who are lost or in distress.
An internal report produced in the months after Dziekanski's fatal confrontation with police concluded airport staff followed their training and did nothing wrong, but made more than two dozen recommendations that have been put into place.
At a public inquiry that wrapped up in October, the airport repeatedly pointed to those changes as proof it had learned from the incident, while at the same time denying there was anything wrong in the first place.
"It is improbable that such a tragedy will ever occur again, however, the degree and nature of this tragedy requires that everything possible be done to ensure it does not happen again," the airport said in its written final submission to the inquiry.
"The systems and standards (the airport) had at the time were effective for most passengers."
Inquiry commissioner Thomas Braidwood's final report is expected to be released next year, and it will contain recommendations to prevent similar deaths.
The inquiry also focused on the actions of federal border officers who dealt with Dziekanski before he encountered the police and the four RCMP officers, one of whom used a Taser on Dziekanski within seconds of arriving.
Cisowski's lawsuit is just one of several legal cases connected to Dziekanski's death and the inquiry.
Three of the officers will be in the B.C. Court of Appeal this week to challenge the inquiry's authority to make findings of misconduct against them; Taser International is suing the inquiry commissioner over the findings of an earlier report that concluded the weapons can kill; and the officer who fired the Taser, Const. Kwesi Millington, is suing the CBC for libel.
