How To Determine When An Employer Has Just Cause To Fire

By Author: Judy Morrow
Total Articles: 15
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One of the many questions we receive from prospective clients at Peter Proszanski Peter Proszanski and associates, is how does an employer determine just cause when they fire an employee? It seems like every day, employees are discovering new rights to avoid either being fired or losing any compensation after being terminated from their job.

Under the Employment Standards Act Of Ontario, an employer may still be required to compensate an employee for any compensation up to the point where their contract was terminated. As many of our Toronto personal injury lawyer have discovered, most employers just assume, that because they fired an employee for just cause, it does not require them to compensate that employee for the time they spent working for them.

This in turn, has led to as many lawsuits, as you would see for traumatic brain injurytraumatic brain injury lawsuits. Meaning to say, the majority of firings ...
... do not have a just cause, thus leading to a lawsuit. For the reason that employers and their slip fall accident lawyers are attempting to limit the number of compensation claims, the Ontario court systems have been burdened with determining if compensation has to be given regardless of cause.

Under the aforementioned Employment Standards Act Of Ontario, the employer has to show just cause for firing an employee, if they believe they should not have to pay the employee. Employers believe that if they give an employee enough warnings before a firing, it should be just cause for letting that person go. For instance, in a recent court decision in the case Oosterbosch v Aerospace Inc. the company suggested, that through warnings they had given Oosterbosch from 2007 to 2008, it was enough to justify firing him from his shuttle building job. Oosterbosch on the contrary argued that the warnings were not just cause, as he didn’t realize they were warnings.