Edmonton Employment Law

In the case of Twilley v. Alberta , a dismissed government employee challenged the applicability of a statutory pay-in-lieu-of-notice framework to constructive dismissal scenarios. In reaching its decision, unfortunately, the Court of King's Bench relied on propositions from the Alberta Court of Appeal that are, inarguably, no longer good law . Not entirely the Court's fault; the unsuccessful Applicant relied on those same propositions. Legal Background In 2019, the newly-elected UCP government amended the Public Service Act  to fix the amount of notice or pay in lieu of notice that dismissed employees would receive, by adding s.25.01. (3)   Notwithstanding any right existing at common law, an employee who is terminated without cause is entitled to a period of notice of termination no greater than the following:                           ...

A few months ago, the Alberta Court of Justice decided a wrongful dismissal case in Yee v. WestJet . It's an antivax case with a number of analytical problems. The short version of the facts is that, in response to Federal government mandates, WestJet implemented a vaccine policy. Yee sought an exception under the policy on the basis of 'religious convictions', and WestJet denied the request, and dismissed the employee upon the failure to comply with the policy. The court concluded that the policy was properly implemented, but that WestJet failed to accommodate Yee, and therefore wrongfully dismissed her. I've expressed concerns before about how the courts deal with an employer's ability to implement vaccine mandates . In this context, faced with direct regulatory action requiring such a policy, I'm less concerned. But the outcome here troubles me in several ways. The court's analysis of the jurisdictional question is problematic; it drew conclusions on the ...

There's a recent decision gathering some attention, Wigdor v. Facebook . A couple of interesting issues in that decision, including enforceability of termination language in a written employment agreement, but one major issue dealt with his restricted stock units (RSUs) which would have vested during his statutory and/or common law notice period. Weirdly, the decision doesn't refer to Matthews v. Ocean Nutrition  at all, which is a curious choice, because it's clearly trying to operate in the framework crafted by Matthews . Legal Backdrop and Principles Most employees, upon dismissal, are entitled to some amount of notice, pursuant to various statutes and/or contractual terms. Commonly, as in this case (as the court found), employees may be entitled to 'reasonable' notice. Where somebody is entitled to reasonable notice, and they're dismissed without notice, they are typically entitled to 'pay in lieu of notice' - that is, compensation for what they woul...

There's a developing question of how the 'constructive dismissal' doctrine will be applied to the various employers bringing remote workers back into the workplace. There's not a lot of case law on this yet. I suspect there will be. But all of the cases I've seen so far have had some fairly exceptional characteristics, none of them speaking directly to an employer's ability to bring an employee back to work. Briggs In Briggs v. ABC Insurance Solutions , in BC, an employee had been hired for a hybrid role. The employer was in the course of shifting everyone to be fully in-office (but hadn't done so yet), and the employee was trying to negotiate a commuting allowance. Because the employer wasn't engaging her in a conversation about it (she believed she'd been promised the allowance, but that's not really the point here), she declared that she'd work from home until the details were worked out. The employer took the position that this was a repu...