ARTICLES & COMMENTARY
Workplace Law · Dispute Resolution · Institutional Design
October 2026
Should Wrongful Dismissal Stay in the Courts?
Ontario is considering creating a specialized court list for employment disputes.
Perhaps we should go further.
The Civil Rules Review has recommended a province-wide system of specialized court lists, including one for employment matters.
That makes sense.
But it also raises a larger question.
If employment disputes are sufficiently distinct to warrant specialized treatment within the courts, the next question is whether all of those disputes belong in the courts in the first place.
I’ve spent much of my professional life working within and administering specialized workplace dispute-resolution systems. One thing that experience taught me is that specialization is about more than who ultimately decides a case. There is a significant difference between managing litigation and managing disputes.
A workplace tribunal can be designed to assume responsibility for a dispute from intake through resolution — triaging it, actively managing it, mediating where appropriate and adjudicating where necessary, while deploying its resources according to the needs of the case.
Ontario already has decades of experience with that institutional model.
The Civil Rules Review was not mandated to redesign Ontario’s workplace dispute-resolution system. Its proposed employment list nevertheless creates an opportunity to consider the larger institutional question.
Ontario should examine transferring ordinary common-law wrongful dismissal jurisdiction to an appropriately expanded specialized workplace tribunal, while preserving the substantive rights and remedies currently available through the courts.
The Rules Review has opened the door to specialization.
Perhaps we should walk through it.
Update: Originally published on Linkedin on September 30, 2026. The institutional question raised in this commentary was subsequently submitted to Ontario's Civil Rules Committee for consideration as part of the Civil Rules Implementation process.
September 2026
What Bugs Me About Bill C-39
My goodness.
The best way to weaken collective bargaining may be to make failure less consequential. That is what bugs me about part of Bill C-39.
Roughly 95% of federal labour disputes are already resolved without a work stoppage. That strikes me as a reasonably important fact before we start improving the machinery.
There is much in the proposed approach that makes sense. Earlier engagement can help. So can skilled mediation and attention to difficult bargaining relationships.
But the proposed Special Mediator is sort-of, kind-of, interesting.
The mediator gets 21 days to help the parties reach an agreement. If that fails, the mediator reports on the outstanding issues, the parties’ positions and participation, the prospects for settlement, and provides views and recommendations. In most unresolved cases, the report becomes public.
That changes the room. Quite a bit.
Maybe public reporting creates useful pressure and accountability. Maybe everybody behaves better knowing there may eventually be an audience. Maybe they also start performing for it. Parties behave differently when the person helping them explore settlement may later report publicly on the process and recommend an outcome. I would be careful about calling that simply “more mediation.”
There is another weird wrinkle. Completion of the Special Mediator process also sits on the path to possible government intervention under s.107 where a work stoppage has significant adverse national consequences. The important question isn’t only what government intends to do. It is what the parties think government might do.
Collective bargaining occurs in the shadow of what happens if bargaining fails. If either side thinks holding out may eventually produce government intervention, that expectation enters the bargaining room long before the government does. Having spent much of my career in labour relations — including collective bargaining mediation — I learned something fairly basic: the possibility that bargaining may actually fail is not a design flaw. Sometimes the prospect of going over the cliff is what persuades people to stop walking toward it.
Government plainly needs the ability to respond to genuinely exceptional national consequences. Ports, railways and airlines have an unfortunate habit of affecting people who aren’t sitting at the bargaining table. But preserving an emergency capacity is one thing. Creating an expectation that somebody may eventually arrive with an emergency exit is another. I am all for better mediation. Earlier mediation too, where it helps.
But I am less enthusiastic about redesigning a system that already resolves roughly 95% of its disputes without a work stoppage in ways that may make the remaining parties less afraid of failing. The point of the machinery should be to help the parties make their own deal. Not to make it more comfortable for them not to.
August 2026
Two Different Questions or
Perhaps the Same One?
Baker and Li left me wondering about something beyond termination clauses.
A few months earlier, a very different discussion about delay at the OLRB had me thinking less about resources than about what happens to a case between filing and disposition.
They are different problems. But both made me stand a little farther back.
We spend a great deal of time asking whether individual parts of Ontario’s workplace justice system are working as they should. We spend rather less time asking whether we would design those parts as separate systems in the first place.
If we were designing Ontario’s workplace dispute-resolution system today, would we design the one we have?
Perhaps that isn’t an entirely hypothetical question.
