I want to address two topics today:

• what happens when you are terminated while on leave; and,
• why don’t we provide more case specific information.

We were asked recently to consider a situation that made me think of post.  It wouldn’t be right of me to get into details that I think were sent to me in confidence.  However, let’s just say that an employee seemed to me to have been treated poorly, but the customer was asking why we don’t provide cases organized by specific situations, such as termination while pregnant, or termination while on disability leave, or other such circumstances.

I thought I could share my response with everyone, which I edited to leave out confidential information:

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There are an unlimited number of potential categories that one could define.  It would not be possible to design a solution that could anticipate all potential unique facts that employees may encounter and so lawyers, and our service, focus on the key variables of age, length of service, type of job.  Our service attempts to balance two needs: 1) to provide reasonably useful information to our customers about their notice entitlements; and 2) to do so at an affordable cost our customers.  To get very specific and tailored information that you seek, you would need to consult a lawyer, but then pay their fees – significantly higher than ours.  Most of our customers use our service to determine whether what their employers offered is “in the ballpark” so that they can make a more informed decision about whether to engage a lawyer – to know whether to start spending money on legal fees is worth it.  This is not to say that we discourage customers from contacting lawyers.  Quite the opposite.  As our tutorial states, we encourage our potential customers to consult a lawyer if they wish information that is precisely specific to their situation.

Generally speaking, that a mother is on … leave … does not generally, in itself, increase or decrease the specific applicable notice period.  However, terminating a person in this way increases the risk that an employer has engaged in “bad faith” conduct which could increase the damages to which an employee would be entitled.  We refer to these “bad faith” damages situation in our tutorial….which our service does not cover.

If you wish to obtain cases involving wrongful dismissal of people … dismissed while [on leave] then I would encourage you to go to the Canadian Case database, where we draw our cases from, which is a database created by a consortium of law all courthouses in Canada, and enter in these search terms in the search box.  You can then review all of the cases that match that search query: www.canlii.org.  Hopefully, our service, combined with a scan of cases in canlii will get you closer to what you need.

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Maybe some of you will also find www.CANLII.org useful.  Many of our customers often use them in tandem.  Using us as a starting point, finding the right cases on CANLII (Canada’s case database maintained by the courts) and then delving deeper on their own.  Many of them find that we provide a great starting point since a query search on CANLII typically produces results like Google searches, a LOT of junk that you have to sift through - a very time consuming exericse that we’ve already undertaken.