Case information

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Case summaries are prepared by the Office of the Registrar of the Supreme Court of Canada (Law Branch). Please note that summaries are not provided to the Judges of the Court. They are placed on the Court file and website for information purposes only.

Arbitration - Procedural fairness - Judicial review - Whether arbitrator’s decision satisfies requirement for justification, transparency and intelligibility in the decision-making process - What is the appropriate standard of review - Was the failure to provide supporting reasoning in the Award a breach of procedural fairness - Does the reasonableness analysis from Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick 2008 SCC 9, [2008] 1 S.C.R. 190 take the place of a procedural fairness analysis - Can the result of an administrative decision make it reasonable, even if there was a duty to provide reasons and there are no supporting reasons - Was the Court of Appeal correct in finding that the Award was reasonable.

The Applicant Union filed a grievance alleging that annual leave hours had been improperly deducted for a group of its member nurses. The Respondent Health Authority claimed that there had been an error in the original calculation of the nurses’ leave entitlement, because casual employment had been improperly included. An arbitrator concluded that, under the terms of their collective agreement, members of the Union could not use their years of service as casual employees for the purpose of calculating vacation entitlement once their status changed to permanent employees. Under the definition of “casual employee” in the agreement, casual employees were not entitled to certain benefits, including those under Article 17 (entitlement to vacation with pay). Instead, casual employees received a twenty percent wage premium. The Applicant applied for judicial review of that decision, claiming that vacation entitlement was calculated on the basis of “service”, which included the hours worked as a casual employee.