Articles

Effective January 1, 2018, the Ontario Employment Standards Act, 2000 (the “ESA”), was amended to require employers to provide pay for two of the ten personal emergency leave days available to employees, and to make personal emergency leave available to all employees. The introduction of paid personal emergency leave created uncertainty for employers whose existing collective agreements or individual contracts of employment provided employees with some form of income protection for illness or other types of personal emergencies.
In United Steel Workers, Local 2020 and Bristol Machine Works Ltd, a labour arbitrator found that employees were not entitled to claim an additional two paid personal emergency leave days in the circumstances, as the collective agreement provided the employees with a greater right or benefit than the ESA.

In June 2016, Dirk Plate was convicted of fraud in a multi-million dollar overbilling scheme involving his employer, Atlas Copco Canada. Inc. Mr. Plate was sentenced to five years in prison for his involvement in the scheme, which involved the misappropriation of funds from Mr. Plate’s employer through the use of false advances of bonuses, approvals of illegitimate expense reimbursements and inflated and/or false invoices. In March 2018, a Toronto judge ruled in favour of Mr. Plate’s former employer in a civil action against Mr. Plate, the former General Manager (and later, Vice-President) of the Construction and Mining division at the company’s Sudbury, Ontario office. The Court found that Mr. Plate had been a fiduciary of the company, and that he had breached that duty when he became aware of the fraud scheme, benefitted from it and allowed it to continue. Accordingly, Mr. Plate was found liable for all damages incurred by the company during the period that Mr. Plate was aware of the fraudulent scheme, a sum of $20 million.

The Court of Appeal for Ontario recently overturned the order of a motion judge striking a plaintiff’s claim for damages in negligence against two coffee shop employees. The plaintiff alleged that she had been injured when a barista poured scalding hot water on her hands, and sued both the employee and the manager of the store. The corporation brought a motion to strike the statement of claim against the manager and barista on the basis that it did not disclose a “reasonable cause of action” against either individual, and that the personal naming of the employees was an abuse of process. The Court of Appeal disagreed, finding that the general rule is that an employee acting in the course of his or her employment can be sued personally for breaching a duty of care owed to a customer.