In Quirola v Xerox, Justice Pitt wrote of wrongful dismissal as follows:
"The word wrongful in employment law has been used to define unjustified dismissal or in other words dismissal without cause."
The author of the doctrinal text Wrongful Dismissal, Canadian author David Harris, refers to it obliquely as:
"... the unlawful termination of the employment contract".
Upon ending an employment contract, the common law or employment standards statute holds an employer to give an employee notice in terms of weeks or months in advance of termination. Alternatively, the employer may wish to see the employee leave the work premises immediately in which event the employer would extend severance pay, pay in lieu of notice.
Here is how it typically plays out:
- On occasion, an employer, intentionally or mistakenly, terminates an employee alleging just cause such as egregious work-related conduct of the employee. In that context, the employer exercises his right to summarily dismiss the employee - without notice or severance pay.
- The employee who feels he was dismissed without just cause then alleges wrongful dismissal: that he or she ought to have received either reasonable notice of termination or severance pay in lieu of notice, in the absence of which he or she alleges to have been wrongfully dismissed and entitled to damages equal to the notice period or equivalent severance pay so alleged.
Employees do not have a right to a job for life and can be dismissed for economic or performance reasons but they cannot be dismissed capriciously without reasonable notice or summarily upon just cause.
All employment implies an employment contract, which may be supplemented by labor or employment standards legislation.
Either could provide for certain procedures to be followed, failing which any firing is a wrongful dismissal and for which the employee could ask a court for damages against the employer.
Can also be referred to as wrongful discharge or dismissal without just cause.
REFERENCES:
- Duhaime, Lloyd, Wrongful Dismissal In Canada.
- Harris, David, Wrongful Dismissal (Toronto: Thomson-Carswell, 208), page 1-1.
- Quirola v. Xerox Canada Inc. 16 CCEL 2d 235 (1996, ONT)