In the fall of 2014, Justice Lemon of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice decided that a private school had wrongfully dismissed a teacher who had committed academic fraud by submitting grades he knew to be inaccurate and then lied about it. The decision seemed all the more egregious as, in addition to awarding the teacher 12 months' salary and benefits, the Court also found the teacher became disabled following the termination of his employment and was entitled to disability benefits in addition to $130,000 of legal costs awarded on a substantial indemnity basis.
In a June 2016 2:1 split decision, the Ontario Court of Appeal has reversed this decision and reinforced the test for just cause. In particular, the Court of Appeal reinforced that the "core question" is whether the employee's misconduct is sufficiently serious to strike "at the heart of the employment relationship". In this case, the Court of Appeal found that the trial judge failed to assess the seriousness of the teacher's misconduct in a meaningful way. The majority of the Court of Appeal found that "one of a teacher's most important professional obligations is to fairly and properly evaluate and assess student progress and achievement". The teacher's misconduct here was intentional and, therefore constituted serious misconduct and there were no circumstances to excuse or mitigation the misconduct.
The other critical finding on the part of the majority of the Court of Appeal is that the school could have suffered serious harm because of the teacher's misconduct and what was most important was the severity of the potential harm, not that it was not actually suffered. As the teacher's misconduct put the school's continued operation as an accredited private school in jeopardy and destroyed the trust essential for an important relationship, the misconduct struck at the very heart of the employment relationship amounting to just cause for dismissal.
The majority of the Court of Appeal dismissed the action and awarded the school $105,000 in costs for the trial and appeal.
(See Fernandes v. Peel Educational & Tutorial Services Limited, 2016 ONCA 468 (CanLII).)
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