by Karen Sargeant

Can fired employees afford to take their prior employers to court? Are trials too expensive? Are there better ways to secure justice for employees? These are some of the questions a group of lawyers in Ontario, Canada, have been considering.

Earlier this year, the Chief Justice of Ontario expressed concerns that employees can’t afford to “get their day in court.” He said that we should examine how to improve access to justice in employment cases. To that end, the Ontario Bar Association struck a Task Force on Wrongful Dismissal, which is in the process of considering various changes. The following changes are being discussed.

read more…

by Brian Smeenk

Wall Street has seldom been in such disarray. There are bank and insurance company failures the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1929. The credit markets have been in disarray for months. The federal government rescue packages will significantly affect the deficit. Many are predicting a recession in the USA. How has this and how will it affect business and employment in Canada?

Although the Canadian and U.S. economies are inextricably linked, you’d never know it by looking at recent statistics. Despite the fact that American investors have historically been central to helping generate economic activity in Canada, there seems to be little evidence so far that the financial and housing market problems in the United States have slowed the Canadian economy.

read more…

by Brian Smeenk

Suppose you want to change an important term of your Canadian employee’s employment contract, such as the bonus plan, future salary adjustments or the termination package. Can you do it without the employee’s agreement? If so, how?

Western Inventory Service Ltd. recently found out the hard way that it couldn’t unilaterally alter an important part of an executive’s contract — his severance package — without first terminating the contract. That termination made the company liable for the very severance package it was seeking to reduce, plus most of the executive’s legal costs.

read more…

by Karen Sargeant

Americans are not the only ones going to the polls for a federal election this year. Canadians are on their way, too. Despite a planned federal election for October 2009, the Prime Minister just called a federal election, to take place on October 14, 2008.

So how would this election affect labor laws in Canada? The answer may be “not much.”

read more…

by Karen Sargeant

We have all read a lot about employers monitoring employees’ computer use and whether employees can be fired for inappropriate computer use at work. What about inappropriate computer use at home? Can employees in Canada be fired for that? Two recent decisions say yes.

In both cases, one from Alberta and one from Ontario, employees were fired for blogging about their workplaces. Although the blogs were the employees’ personal blogs, the content in the blogs justified their terminations for cause.

read more…