Services for Employers

---

If you're an employee in Canada outside of Quebec - whether it's your first employee or your fiftieth - the contract you put in front of them is one of the most important business documents you'll ever sign. Done well, it protects your company, sets clear expectations, and limits your exposure if the relationship doesn't work out. Done poorly, it can leave you on the hook for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in severance you never planned to pay.  

If you're managing employees, the documentation sitting in your personnel files is often the difference between a clean, defensible decision and an expensive surprise from a court, tribunal, or labour board. Most employers don't think about their paper trail until they're across the desk from a lawyer trying to explain why they fired someone—and by then, it's usually too late to fix. 

When workplace complaints arise, employers need a thorough, impartial investigation that holds up to scrutiny. Our firm conducts confidential workplace investigations into allegations of harassment, discrimination, bullying, and misconduct, delivering clear findings and defensible reports that protect your organization and inform next steps. With a litigator's eye for evidence and procedural fairness, we help employers navigate sensitive matters with discretion and legal rigour.

Most employers know they need to be careful when they fire someone. What catches them off guard is finding out they have legally fired someone without realizing it. That is the trap of constructive dismissal. A change you saw as a normal business decision, a difficult management situation, or a temporary cost saving measure can be reframed by a court as a termination, opening the door to full common law severance and a wrongful dismissal claim. 

A reasonable sounding business decision, a routine interview question, or an attendance management process that has worked for years can all become the basis of a human rights claim if a protected ground is in the picture. Once a claim is filed, the question is no longer whether you intended to discriminate. It is whether your decision had a discriminatory effect, and whether you can prove you handled it the way the law required. 

Workplace harassment is one of the few employment law issues where doing nothing is itself a violation. Ontario employers are required by statute to have a policy, run a program, investigate complaints, and communicate the results in writing. When that does not happen, what may have started as a difficult interpersonal situation often becomes the foundation of a Ministry of Labour order, a constructive dismissal claim, a human rights application, and sometimes all three at once. 

Independent contractor arrangements are everywhere, and so is the misclassification risk that comes with them. Many Ontario employers assume that calling a worker a contractor, paying them by invoice, and putting "independent contractor" at the top of an agreement is enough to keep that worker outside employment law. It is not. Courts, the Ministry of Labour, the Canada Revenue Agency, and the WSIB each apply their own tests, and a worker who looks like a contractor on paper can still be found to be an employee or a dependent contractor in substance. When that happens, the bill from a single misclassified worker can be substantial. When it happens across an entire workforce of contractors, it can be company changing.