Edmonton Employment Law

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...

A little over a year ago, in Dufault v. Ignace , Justice Pierce of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice accepted an argument that a termination clause entitling the employer to dismiss on a not-for-cause basis "at any time" was in conflict with employment standards legislation, thus voiding the entire termination clause. The Court of Appeal dismissed the employer's appeal , finding that the Waksdale  problem in the contract was fatal, and declined to address the merits of the "at any time" issue. Subsequently, in Baker v. Van Dolder's , Justice Sproat - found that he was bound to follow Justice Pierce's decision (as well as the Perretta  approach I recently commented on ). It's an interesting case because, while Justice Sproat is himself a well-regarded employment law jurist, he didn't engage much with the underlying principles, instead looking to the doctrine of stare decisis  ("it stands decided") as recently expanded upon by the SCC...

There's a highly dubious line of case law coming out of Ontario dealing with termination language in employment contracts. Ontario lawyers who read that line will initially wonder "which one?" There are a lot of evolving doctrines in Ontario right now that make it difficult to enforce termination language. The reality is that I agree with most of those, on their principles. But not this one: Courts are finding, increasingly, that employers who do not comply with their termination obligations under written contracts of employment are not able to later rely on the termination clause. I understand the motivation to take this approach, but it's completely irreconcilable with first principles of employment law. Background A brief primer: By default, every employment contract is presumed to contain an implied term that neither side will terminate it without 'reasonable notice' to the other. This concept is most often applied when employees are dismissed without caus...