Unjust Dismissal Under the Canada Labour Code: New Law, Old Statute
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd v Wilson (Wilson), the Federal Court held for the first time that an employer may terminate an employee without cause, so long as the employer provides notice or severance pay. Wilson overturned decades of jurisprudence regarding unjust dismissal and interpretation of the Canada Labour Code. This paper critically reviews Wilson and the subsequent decision by the Federal Court of Appeal upholding this ruling. This paper ultimately argues the Wilson decision is wrong because it frustrates the purpose of the Canada Labour Code and unfairly shifts the burden of proof from the employer to the employee.\nThis article is helpful for readers seeking to learn more about: Canada Labour Code, unjust dismissal, notice, termination notice, severance, labour law, employment law, employee, without cause, just cause, layoff, layoffs, reinstatement, arbitration, law arbitration \nTopics in this article include: Federal Court, Federal Court of Appeal, adjudicators, frustration, frustrate, evidentiary onus, arbitrariness, procedural fairness, procedural considerations, burden of proof \nKey authorities cited in this article include: Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd v Wilson Champagne v Atomic Energy of Canada Limited Sigloy v DHL Express (Canada) Ltd Wright v Nisga’a Lisims Government Taypotat v Mucospetung First Nation
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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 | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".