Employer Bullying: Implied Duties of Fair Dealing in Canadian Employment Contracts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are two approaches to employer bullying in the Canadian common law of employment. One approach treats it as a breach of an implied term of the employment contract requiring fair dealing (repudiation by breach of contract, or RBB). The other treats it as a repudiation of contract without any breach (repudiation without breach, or RWB), because bullying makes the employment relationship intolerable. This paper compares these two approaches and contrast them with the British model, which treats employer bullying as a breach of an contractual implied term requiring the preservation of mutual trust and confidence. The author argues that the RWB approach provides a narrower scope of protection for employees than the RBB approach and discounts the possibility that separate damages should be available for breach of an implied term requiring fair dealing. The author considers the complicating factor of the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Wallace. That case requires all damages resulting from employer bullying in the manner of dismissal to be treated as an extension to the reasonable notice required for termination of contract. This means that employer bullying in the performance of the contract can be treated as a distinct breach of the implied duty on Canadian employers to treat employees with decency, civility, respect, and dignity. The author proposes a test for distinguishing bullying conduct that is in the performance of the contract and conduct that is in the manner of dismissal.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".