B.C. court awards $1.8M in damages for assault, wrongful arrest by Metrotown guards

A man carries bags of groceries while walking through the Metropolis at Metrotown shopping mall in Burnaby, B.C., on Sunday, April 12, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

VANCOUVER — The B.C. Supreme Court has awarded $1.8 million in damages to a man who was assaulted and wrongfully arrested by security guards as a teenager at Metrotown mall in 2019.

The court ruling says $1 million of the award is for punitive damages to be paid by Paladin Security, after the company’s trained guards pushed the teen down a set of stairs and wrongfully arrested them, testifying they “believed they had done nothing wrong.”

The ruling says the plaintiff, anonymized since they were a minor at the time, is a transgender man who identified as female in 2019, and had been banned from the mall in the months before the assault, arrest and detention that spurred the lawsuit.

It says the defendants, Paladin and mall owner Ivanhoe Cambridge, admitted to the assault of the plaintiff, who was 17 at the time, and that the unlawful arrest involved excessive force and false imprisonment by locking the plaintiff in a mall detention cell without access to a phone.

The court ruling says the defendants also admitted that the guards’ conduct caused “pain, a concussion, bruising, headaches, exhaustion, sleep disturbance, anxiety, depression and loss of self-esteem.”

The judge says Paladin Security was “extremely lucky” in the case because the injuries suffered by the plaintiff were serious but “nowhere near what was reasonably foreseeable” in the circumstances, and that “nothing less” than $1 million in punitive damages would get the company’s attention.

The judge found Paladin senior management was dismissive about the incident and failed to properly investigate what occurred after receiving a complaint.

“Even after this lawsuit was filed, Paladin failed, once again, to carefully consider and review these serious allegations and consider corrective action,” the ruling says. “Paladin’s uncaring attitude is not a one-time occurrence, but part of the culture of how upper management responds to complaints of excessive force employed by their workforce.”

The damages award also includes $250,000 in aggravated damages, $25,000 for past income loss, $500,000 for future income and loss of earning capacity, and $25,000 for future care.

“We are both surprised and disappointed by the ruling,” Paladin president Chad Kalyk said in an email to The Canadian Press. “We are reviewing the decision carefully and obtaining advice on a possible appeal.”

Lawyers for the plaintiff did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 23, 2026.