David Gelles - Articles & Videos

An employee earns a substantial amount of money each year in variable bonuses. Are they entitled to that bonus as part of their severance? If so, how do you assess what they should get when the amounts varied greatly from year to year?

If you’ve been reading our blog, you have seen our 2025 Year in Review (Part 1, Part 2), where we covered the most notable cases, legislative updates, and HR trends from the past year. If it felt like a lot of information, that’s because it is!

As we often say, it is important to stay up to date as the laws evolve. It is equally important to take those developments into account and ensure that you have a set of best practices that are in place and up to date.

Welcome to Part Two of our year in review. Employment law continues to evolve at a remarkable pace, often struggling to catch up with social changes. As we hinted in Part One, in Ontario this evolution is frequently packaged with the government’s Working for Workers Acts, which has now reached its seventh version. In Part Two, we dive into legislative updates across Canada and discuss what to expect in 2026.

Welcome to Part One of our 2025 Employment Law Year in Review. The Canadian employment law landscape remains highly uncertain, driven by continuous legislative evolution (like Ontario’s Working for Workers Act) and dramatic shifts in case law.

As we wrap up 2025, employment lawyers have circled January 16, 2026 on their calendars. This is the date when the Ontario Court of Appeal (the “ONCA”) will hear the appeals in the Baker v Van Dolder’s Home Team Inc. (“Baker”), and in Li v Wayfair Canada ULC (“Li”) decisions, two of 2025’s notable termination clause decisions.

Stuart likes using the line: “just cause is not a lost cause” to support the proposition that while establishing just cause for dismissal is difficult, it is not impossible. The same is not true for termination clauses that purport to define “just cause”, a common law standard.

If you’ve spent any time on dating apps, you’ll know that a common feature on people’s profiles is often an argument about Oxford commas (which is why I’m partial to the offline world). Jokes aside, comma placement is important, as the Employer in Brocklehurst v. Micco Companies Limited, 2025 NSSC 192 (“Micco”) discovered.

In the niche world of employment law, by insisting on shorter documents, employers risk leaving a lot of rights on the table.

Constructive dismissal is triggered when an employer makes substantial changes to fundamental terms of the employment relationship without having the right to make those changes, or without the employee’s consent.