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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".