Class Actions, Workplace Harassment, and Discrimination Disputes: A Case Study of <i>Lewis V Westjet Airlines Ltd</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Lewis v WestJet Airlines Ltd (Lewis) is the most recent decision to conclude that class actions are not preferable to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) in resolving claims arising from workplace discrimination and harassment. Lewis has profound implications for class counsel and federally regulated industries as class actions may no longer be available for any claims that the CHRT has shared jurisdiction over. After reviewing the procedural and remedial provisions under the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA), I found that the CHRT is incapable of overcoming barriers faced by employees in pursuing claims of workplace discrimination and harassment. Class actions, on the other hand, are equipped with various financial resources for claimants, addressing the economic barrier to access to justice. Also, class actions obviate the need for requiring every employee to participate in the dispute resolution process and therefore minimize re-traumatization of victims, a psychological barrier to access to justice. The CHRT cannot adequately manage a massive number of discrimination claims brought against the same employer as envisioned by McLachlin CJ in Hollick v Toronto (City). The aggregation of complaints, which enables the creation of a settlement that binds the entire class, is what makes a class action work, and that mechanism is not available in the CHRT process. As such, Lewis, to the extent that it undermined these practical problems with the CHRT, was wrongly decided. Ultimately, I suggest that the coexistence of the CHRT and class action regimes will best achieve the goal of access to justice.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".