David Gelles - Articles & Videos

Equity compensation, whether stock options, restricted stock units (“RSUs”), or share awards, is a potentially lucrative component of an employee’s compensation package. When an employee is wrongfully dismissed, losing out on unvested equity can translate to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in damages. But while determining whether an employee is entitled to lost equity is critical, a second, equally important question remains: how exactly do courts determine the monetary value of those lost shares? 

We always caution our clients that employment law is constantly changing. Just when you think the law on an issue is settled, a decision comes along that turns back the clock. That is exactly what happened in the recent Ontario Superior Court decision Wilsher v. Olympic Wholesale (“Wilsher”).

As we often see in litigation, doubling down on a losing hand doesn’t just waste time, it can cost a lot of money. In the recent Ontario Court of Appeal decision in Adelman v. IBM Canada Limited (“Adelman”), the employee successfully sued for wrongful dismissal, securing $682,151.18 in damages.

The duty to mitigate requires an employee who has been wrongfully dismissed to make reasonable efforts to mitigate their damages (i.e.: lost employment income) by finding comparable employment. The key words here are reasonable and comparable. Employees are not expected to make finding new work their new full time job. Likewise, employees are not expected to go and find just any job; a software engineer does not have to accept a line-cook position. The catch is that once an employee accepts a new job – comparable or not – every dollar earned during their notice period is deducted from any award they ultimately receive.

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.