HR Updates: Laws, Trends & Insights

What Happened: Walking past campus Pro-Life demonstrators and their graphic signs displaying an aborted fetus was literally a traumatic experience for an academic coordinator who suffered a miscarriage on a bathroom floor three months into her pregnancy. After HR and the faculty association rejected her desperate pleas to stop the demonstrations, she sued the university for not protecting her from workplace harassment. The university claimed that banning the demonstrations would violate demonstrators’ free speech rights. Citing their traumatic effect on the coordinator’s psychological health, the Alberta arbitrator ruled that tolerating the demonstrators’ graphic signs violated the university’s OHS duty to protect her from a workplace “hazard.” While bound to respect their free speech rights, the university could legally have imposed reasonable limitations to protect the coordinator, such as requiring demonstrators to provide advance notice of demonstrations and keep to one side of the quadrangle. Result: The university had to pay the coordinator $10,000 in damages [Mount Royal University v Mount Royal Staff Association, 2026 CanLII 78315 (AB GAA), August 4, 2026].

Significance: Free speech doesn’t give workers or visitors licence to harass another person at the workplace, especially when employers can impose reasonable restrictions to protect the victim while still respecting the speaker’s speech rights.

What To Do: Find out more about the laws governing free speech and political speech in the workplace and how to impose fair restrictions without violating employees’ rights.

What Happened: While admitting to handing in a written resignation letter, a senior government official claimed he was forced to resign and sued the city for constructive dismissal. But the New Brunswick court wasn’t impressed. The fact that the city first broached the issue of resignation didn’t automatically prove the official was forced out. Objectively, nobody told him he had to resign, the court reasoned, even if that’s how he subjectively understood the message. As a result, the resignation was voluntary and the official not only wasn’t entitled to damages but also had to pay the city’s legal costs [Daniel Laforge v. Grand Falls, 2026 NBKB 162 (CanLII), August 5, 2026].

Significance: An employee’s intent to resign must be clear and unambiguous. Although the employer won, the case illustrates that even a letter of resignation doesn’t demonstrate such an intention when it’s given under duress.

What To Do: Find out more about the law of resignation and how to avoid inadvertent wrongful dismissal by wrongfully assuming that an employee who no longer works for you has resigned.

Temporary Physical Disabilities Don’t Frustrate Employee’s ContractWhat Happened: A towing company demoted a senior employee returning from long-term disability from road boss to tow truck driver. The court ruled that the company committed constructive dismissal and awarded the employee 22 months’ notice. The company acknowledged constructive dismissal but claimed that the employee’s inability to carry out the physical demands of road boss frustrated his contract. The Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that there was no frustration because the company never expressly defined the essential positions of the road boss position. The evidence also showed that the employee’s physical limitations were only temporary and that the company could have accommodated them. However, while upholding the ruling on liability, the Court said the lower court shouldn’t have included the loss of perks like the employee’s use of the company’s tow truck and cel phone as damages and reduced the damage award by $125,640 [Hill v. 1359768 Ontario Inc. (B&B Towing), 2026 ONCA 577 (CanLII), August 10, 2026].

Significance: It’s extremely difficult to claim that a disability frustrates an employee’s contract when there’s no written job description expressly spelling out the essential duties of the job.

What To Do: Find out more about the importance of job descriptions and how to write them in a legally sound way.

There’s a new case out of Ontario that all HR directors should know about. It began when a night shift supervisor with 17 years of service got fired after admitting to occasionally “topping up” employees’ hours, including giving full hours to workers who left before their shift ended when all work had been completed. His defence: This was the same “clock out/top up” practice used by all night shift supervisors for at least 19 years, which started before I got here and is continuing even now. The Ontario court concluded that the supervisor was wrongfully dismissed.  “The evidence establishes that ‘topping up’ employees’ hours was an ingrained institutional practice that existed at [the company] for a lengthy period and was applied consistently and uniformly by all Night Shift Supervisors.” The price tag: 19 months of pay in lieu of notice plus 14 months in Wallace damages for bad faith in carrying out the termination [Wilsher v. Olympic Wholesale, 2026 ONSC 3620 (CanLII), June 26, 2026]. Action point: Find out about the 6 steps to take to prevent employees from committing time theft. But also remember what happened in Wilsher. The moral: Employers are on shaky ground when seeking to discipline employees for violating policies that have been inconsistently or not enforced in the past. This is true not just of time theft but any HR policy.