Edmonton Employment Law

Back in June, I wrote about a summary dismissal from Ontario, Taylor v. Hanley Hospitality , where Ontario's Infectious Disease Emergency Leave provisions were interpreted as displacing the common law of constructive dismissal: An employee put on a temporary layoff from March to September 2020 (then recalled, and she in fact went back to work) sued in constructive dismissal, and the court found that the effect of Ontario's IDEL regulation was that she was deemed on a 'leave', not a layoff that would breach her contract. This decision was exactly the opposite of what another Ontario Superior Court judge in an earlier decision, Coutinho . This has attracted a lot of attention. In addition to my earlier post, Sean Bawden wrote about it and argued that it was wrong on its face ; Brian Langille and Saambavi Mano argued that Justice Ferguson misapprehended the interplay between the common law of contracts and the statutory regime ; and Stuart Rudner said that the conflicting ...

Given all this talk of human rights and unfairness in the context of anti-restriction protests, let's clear up some myths. For clarity, when I talk about "human rights" in Canada, I'm talking very specifically about rights under the human rights statutes that exist in every jurisdiction in Canada - NOT about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is different. (The Charter limits only  what government can do. These statutes create obligations for other people and organizations.) We're talking about laws like the (Federal) Canadian Human Rights Act , the Alberta Human Rights Act , and the Ontario Human Rights Code . The Basics: What These Laws Do The core goal of these laws is to stop discrimination on certain 'prohibited grounds' (like age, sex, race, religion, disability, and various others) in specified 'social areas' (like employment, services, etc.). The specific grounds and social areas vary. Each law has different sets of lists, and even t...