The Blog

A recent case demonstrates the challenge employers face when seeking reduced damages for an employee’s inadequate attempts to mitigate. The plaintiff in Hucsko v. A.O. Smith Enterprises, 2020 ONSC 1346, made no efforts to find alternative employment after termination, but the Court opted not to reduce his damages because the defendant company did not lead sufficient evidence of the availability of comparable jobs.

A recent case weighs in on an interesting puzzle in the law of wrongful dismissal damages: How to factor mitigation income into the award when the employee gets new work at significantly higher pay. Kideckel v. Gard-X Automotive Refinish Inc. suggests the jurisprudence is consolidating around a principled approach, holding that an employer shouldn’t get retroactive credit for an employee’s surplus mitigation income.

Employers owe their employees a duty of good faith. Breaching that duty during a termination can lead to expansive liability, as the City of Toronto recently learned the hard way. The case of Headley v. City of Toronto involved an employee who was dismissed on allegations of theft and fraud.

A recent case dealt another blow to the utility of “saving clauses” to rectify drafting errors in employment contracts. The Court in Groves v. UTS Consultants Inc. found a clause ostensibly supplanting the employee’s right to reasonable notice of termination was unenforceable and the intention to contract out of the common law was not salvaged by a saving clause that would have limited the employee to Employment Standards Act (Ontario) minimum notice.

Another Alberta wrongful dismissal case will be of interest to employment law and HR geeks seeking to hone their internal reasonable notice gauges. This post summarizes the Bardal Factors, confirms the reasonable notice period, and sets out some points of interest from the judgment in Hickaway v Riddell Kurczaba Architecture Engineering Interior Design Ltd.

Companies generally don’t want to pay their dismissed employees bonuses that accrue after the termination date. But drafting policies to achieve that is easier said than done. The recent Ontario Court of Appeal decision Dawe v The Equitable Life Insurance Company of Canada, 2019 ONCA 512, provides an important example of a policy that was effective in limiting the dismissed employee’s entitlement to bonus.