The Maleficent guide to employee mismanagement: lessons for Ontario employers
Maleficent’s (mis)management highlights a number of issues from which Ontario employers and employees can learn:
workplace harassment
Constructive dismissal update: Employee claiming damages for workplace harassment barred from commencing court action
If this case is upheld on appeal, this decision suggests that if an employee quits because of workplace harassment, then the employee will not be able to bring a constructive dismissal in the courts in some cases.
Unfair Investigation? No Comment.
We are now in a world where workplace harassment is taken much more seriously than it was before. Although some jurisdictions in Canada do not have an explicit legal obligation to investigate incidents of this nature, there is now a pressing moral obligation to do so. But when such a moral obligation is unmoored from legal principles or government-issued guidelines, there is a greater risk of unfairness to all parties. An investigation in this context is more likely to be guided by an emotional drive to either undermine those who raise complaints or persecute those who are alleged to have behaved badly, rather than arriving at factual findings from a neutral perspective using a fair investigation process.
