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.

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.

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.

Social media platforms moderate user-posted content to protect us from offensive, disturbing and sometimes criminal content. This process, however, is not always automatic. It often relies upon the efforts of individual workers to act as gatekeepers, keeping undesirable content at bay.

The size of an employee’s salary is often seen as an indicator of importance within an organization. Thus, when women are paid less than their male counterparts for performing similar work, it suggests that their efforts are somehow of lesser value. In Ontario, we have a number of legal mechanisms that are designed to reduce gender-based wage disparity, however, it remains a reality in far too many workplaces.

Manchester may be best known for its premiership football teams and spawning the likes of Oasis and The Smiths, however, the City was in the headlines last month for something quite different: its Student Union (“MUSU”) voted to replace clapping at all of its events with “jazz hands” (i.e. the practice of waving open hands in the air).

In a recent decision from Windsor, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario ordered an employer to pay almost $60,000 in damages for the way in which a female employee was repeatedly harassed, insulted and humiliated by senior management.

A workplace is a team environment. It functions best when the atmosphere is positive. One of the biggest concerns for employers, in Ontario and elsewhere, is how to address and manage the presence of a “toxic employee” in the workplace.

Last week, VW Lawyers' Andrew Vey spoke at the Ottawa Human Resources Professionals Association Conference on the process of providing reasonable accommodation to Ontario employees at work.