The recent decision of Fleming v. Massey raises the very interesting question of whether an injured employee can waive his or her rights under Part X of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act (WSIA).
On January 11, 2016 an Ontario court imposed the harshest sentence ever for an individual’s role in a workplace accident. A project manager was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for his role in four workplace deaths that occurred on December 24, 2009.
The law of drug and alcohol testing in Canada is in a state of evolution. While the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, Local 30 v Irving Pulp & Paper Ltd., 2013 SCC 34, provided important guidance on the strict standard that employers must meet in order to subject employees to random testing, it raised many questions regarding how those principles would be applied to other forms of testing.
It is time to revisit the topic of Host Liability and what an employer can do to ensure the holiday party is the social event of the year and not a litigation nightmare.
There is another court decision out of the well-known tragedy in Toronto involving five workers who fell from the thirteenth floor of a high-rise building on December 24, 2009. The men’s duties on the date of the accident included pouring concrete on balconies they were using a swing stage to access.
The Nova Scotia Occupational Health and Safety regime is undergoing a complete overhaul, with potential huge impacts for employers respecting cost of compliance and risk of liability. The changes are part of the five-year Workplace Safety Strategy, a joint initiative between the Department of Labour and Advanced Education and the Workers’ Compensation Board. The Strategy was developed in direct response to a recognition that the old system—a piecemeal assortment of rules and regulations—was tough to navigate and produced inconsistency in interpretation and enforcement.
In June 2013, the Supreme Court of Canada weighed in on the issue of random alcohol testing in Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, Local 30 v. Irving Pulp & Paper, Ltd, 2013 SCC 34 (“Irving”). Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Alberta Arbitration Board (the “Board”) recently issued a decision concerning the random drug and alcohol testing policy of Suncor Energy Inc., Oil Sands (“Suncor”). The union in this case, Unifor Local 707A, (“Unifor”) represents over 3,000 employees at Suncor’s oil sands operation in Fort McMurray, Alberta.
Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, Local 30 v. Irving Pulp & Paper Ltd., 2013 SCC 34
On June 14, 2013, the Supreme Court of Canada issued a decision that affirmed the role of alcohol testing in the workplace. The Court upheld the arbitrator’s decision which prohibited the employer’s random alcohol testing policy.
The decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal in Imperial Oil Ltd. v. Communications, Energy & Paperworkers Union of Canada, Local 900, [2009] O.J. No. 2037 [“Imperial”] marks yet another victory for employee privacy rights in the collective bargaining sector.