Edmonton Employment Law

The challenge to the invocation of the Emergencies Act  was successful at the Federal Court, but the government is appealing. As Emmett MacFarlane argues , there's a lot of meat to consider on an appeal, and I largely agree with his assessment. Here are my thoughts, having briefly reviewed the reasons on the critical points. To my understanding, there are basically two core lines of attack against the invocation: The first is that the Emergencies Act , as written, doesn't allow for that scenario to be treated as a public order emergency. The second is that the specific measures imposed - via the Emergency Measures Regulations  and the Emergency Economic Measures Order  - violated the Charter . The government lost on both points, but it's worth questioning both, to varying extents. The Limits of Section 2: Why this doesn't vindicate the Convoy Before I get into the guts of that, I want to highlight that this is hardly a moral victory for the Convoy: The Convoy wasn't...

 At the outset, let me clarify and reiterate that I support vaccination and that, throughout the COVID-19 vaccine era, I have believed that employers have good reason to take measures to protect the workplace from COVID-19 - including through policies that require vaccination. However, I've always been skeptical of whether they have a contractual entitlement to impose such a requirement as a term and condition of employment. I noted in a recent entry that there's a question about the scope of an employer's policy-making powers in a non-union environment. In unionized environments, the rule is that an employer has the right to make any rule that is 'reasonable'. In non-unionized contexts, there was never a lot of consideration of this question - until the COVID vaccine cases started getting heard, and these cases seem to apply the 'reasonableness' approach without a lot of scrutiny as to its appropriateness. In this post, I will explain the bases and operati...