Edmonton Employment Law

A lot of issues recently have arisen surrounding investigation processes. From arguments hinging on inadequacy of an investigation or investigative tunnel-vision , to cases where employers fail to follow the recommendations of the investigator without basis , or questions about the handling of the allegations against Justice Russell Brown . To Suspend, or Not to Suspend? While investigating allegations of misconduct, it's important to treat the allegations as unproven  until and unless they are established. But at the same time, there are legitimate interests to protect in the mean time, which might require that the respondent be removed from their role on a temporary basis. These suspensions are supposed to be  administrative  in nature and not punitive ; when the person is in a role where they're paid, they should continue to get paid as normal through the suspension. (In most non-union employment roles, there's no power to suspend on an unpaid basis anyways, and you r...

 A few months ago, I posted a primer on the employer's duty to accommodate . Let's step it back a bit further and get even more basic, and talk about what kinds of actions human rights legislation protects against - and what kinds of action it DOESN'T protect against. While we talk about it generally as protecting against 'discrimination', it's more accurate to say that it protects against discrimination on the basis of prohibited grounds , and within specified social contexts . There's some variance on both the prohibited grounds and social contexts, from Province to Province. Prohibited Grounds of Discrimination Most prohibited grounds of discrimination are fairly obvious. In Alberta, it's about race, religious belief, colour, gender, gender identity, gender expression, physical disability, mental disability, age, ancestry, place of origin, marital status, source of income, family status, or sexual orientation. These are very broad categories, and exte...

A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring -Alexander Pope A departure from our regular programming for a discussion of trial procedure and television broadcasts. Televised trials happens from time to time in the US, especially for high profile ones - like OJ Simpson's murder trial, or the recent civil trial between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp. They don't go well. In short, the public attention taints the proceedings, forces the litigants, lawyers, and even the judge to attend to public optics in a way that they ordinarily wouldn't, and facilitates vast misrepresentations of the proceedings in the public eye. Televising a trial involving a presidential candidate - and one that's so notoriously a media hog as Donald Trump - would invite the same phenomenon, and do incredible damage to both the trial itself and the court more generally. Background: The Open Court Principle Court proceedings are usually open to the public. There are...

 In my practice, I've been increasingly seeing questions about remote and cross-border work: As an employer, if I send my workers to a project in another Province, can I still just apply Alberta's employment standards, or do I have to structure overtime per that other Province's requirements? If I hire a remote worker in Ontario, which Province's employment standards apply? This turns out to be a difficult  question, with no clear answer in many cases. But let's talk about it. Specifically, I'm going to deal with these questions as being simply within the Canadian context, because once you get into international employment, you get into additional weird questions about tax remittances, etc. (But yes, I've seen those issues on more than one occasion, too.) The Scenarios While many employers operate across Provincial borders, the most standard employment relationship raises no jurisdictional considerations, because the employee works exclusively (or almost ex...

 As a lawyer who works on both sides of the management/employee divide, I see both sides of disputes relating to disability accommodation issues. There's a lot of confusion and uncertainty about what information the employer is (or isn't) entitled to, and what the employee needs to do to in order to fully engage an employer's duty to accommodate. The Duty to Accommodate, Generally People are entitled to be free from discrimination in employment on the basis of disability (among other things). This engages an obligation upon employers to offer 'reasonable accommodation up to the point of undue hardship' to disabled employees who require such accommodation in order to be able to fulfill the needs of the job. While there's nothing wrong with an employer setting various requirements of a given position, if an employee says "I have a disability that prevents me from meeting this requirement", an employer needs a compelling  justification for nonetheless ins...

 So the newest 'scandal' is that Paul Bernardo, basically the epitome of evil within the Canadian context, has been reclassified into a medium security institution. Poilievre thinks this is outrageous, and that the government should just pass a regulation saying that a 'class' of offenders that captures Bernardo - say, 'multiple murderers' - automatically and always get maximum security classification. So let's look at this: Is it possible? Short answer is 'probably not'. It's a pretty superficial and simplistic understanding of Ministerial powers. The Framework We start here with the Corrections and Conditional Release Act , which governs our prison administration. Section 29.1 allows the Commissioner of Corrections to classify different institutions as maximum, medium, minimum, or multi-level security, and directs the CSC to assign classifications to each inmate, in accordance with the directions in the regulations. They have to give reasons fo...