Earlier this month, Vey Willetts LLP was successful at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (“HRTO”) in securing an award of almost $40,000 against a corporate respondent (and its owner) for firing a pregnant employee after 8 days of employment.

ChatGPT (an artificial intelligence language generator financed by Microsoft) has captured the world’s attention. By inputting prompts in plain language, ChatGPT can do a seemingly endless series of tasks. Some are quite mundane – such as answering questions – while others could be revolutionary for automating common and labour-intensive work.

The duty to accommodate disability in the workplace has both procedural and substantive aspects. It is not enough for an employer to merely arrive at the right result; the process in getting there is equally important.

As of February 1, 2020, U-Haul no longer hires nicotine users in 21 of the US states in which it operates. The company, which employs over 30,000 people across the US and Canada, announced this new policy late last year.

For the past two months, the attention of the world has been fixed on Wuhan, China, as the epicentre of a new respiratory virus. The 2019 Novel Coronavirus (or 2019-nCoV) has been declared a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” by the World Health Organization and as of February 8, 2020, there have been eight (8) confirmed cases in Canada.

The Ontario Human Rights Code (the “Code”) protects employees from discrimination in the workplace based on one (or more) of its protected grounds, which include disability, age, creed, sexual orientation, and gender identity. It further places a positive obligation on Ontario employers to reasonably accommodate employees to the point of undue hardship.

In a prior blog article, we wrote about an important decision from the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (“HRTO”) concerning discriminatory hiring practices. That case was Haseeb v. Imperial Oil, and the decision involved Imperial Oil’s policy of requiring all project engineer job applicants to hold either Canadian citizenship or permanent residency in order to be eligible for employment.

Making a complaint of workplace sexual harassment can be daunting. If the actual harassment itself is not bad enough, employees often fear job-based retaliation for speaking out, or that making matters public might undermine their professional reputation.

Q&A is a recurring series on the Vey Willetts LLP blog. The aim is to provide quick answers to questions we commonly encounter in our day-to-day practice of employment law. In this edition, we focus on sexual harassment in the workplace.

Q&A is a recurring series on the Vey Willetts LLP blog. The aim is to provide quick answers to questions we commonly encounter in our day-to-day practice of employment law. In this edition we focus on employee sick leave and medical information.