A workplace harassment investigation may be conducted under federal regulations without turning the resulting report into a decision that the Federal Court can review. That's the central distinction in Ferdoussi v. Air Canada, 2026 FC 1227, where a unionized flight attendant challenged the findings of an external investigator and the discipline that followed an incident at work. The court dismissed her application, but it didn't decide whether the investigator's conclusions about harassment were correct.
The dispute began when Meena Ferdoussi was travelling to Toronto to work a flight to Dubai. Her connecting flight was delayed for several hours on the tarmac, and she reached Toronto about 20 minutes before the scheduled departure. She said a manager reprimanded her in front of others for her late arrival and an incomplete uniform, while another senior crew member ignored her during the flight. Management disputed aspects of her account. A disciplinary meeting followed, and Air Canada issued a letter of reprimand and a seven day suspension. Her union challenged that discipline under the collective agreement.
Ferdoussi also made two complaints through the airline's workplace harassment process, one about the events at the aircraft and another about the disciplinary meeting. An outside investigator, selected under the federal Workplace Harassment and Violence Prevention Regulations, interviewed participants and witnesses and prepared reports. The investigator concluded that the allegations weren't established. In particular, the investigator characterized conduct that was less than ideal as falling within reasonable management action, and found that the conduct at the disciplinary meeting didn't cross the policy's line into harassment. Ferdoussi disagreed and asked the Federal Court to set aside the reports, require a new investigation and remove the disciplinary findings from her file.
Before the court could consider her complaints about the investigation, it had to decide whether the reports were even subject to judicial review in that forum. Justice Duchesne explained that the Federal Court's judicial review jurisdiction depends on an exercise of federal public authority by a body meeting the statutory definition of a federal board, commission or other tribunal. Being subject to federal legislation isn't, by itself, enough. Air Canada's role under the regulations was limited to selecting an investigator from the prescribed list and distributing the reports once the outside investigator completed them. The airline didn't make the investigator's findings, and performing those statutory duties didn't transform it into a federal tribunal.
The court applied the reasoning of the earlier Bibaud litigation involving another federally regulated employer. It held that the reports weren't decisions by Air Canada that could be reviewed through Ferdoussi's application. That jurisdictional conclusion also meant the judge couldn't reach her arguments that the investigation had been procedurally unfair, biased or unreasonable. The dismissal should not be reported as judicial approval of the reports' substantive findings. Those issues were left undecided.
There was a separate problem with her request to remove the discipline. The evidence suggested that the union grievance over the reprimand and suspension was still in progress. Because no exceptional circumstances had been established to justify bypassing that process, the court found the disciplinary challenge premature. It dismissed the application without costs and expressly acknowledged the effort Ferdoussi had made as a self represented litigant.
For federally regulated employers, the case clarifies an important boundary. A statutory obligation to run an investigation doesn't necessarily give an external investigator the public decision making authority of a tribunal, and it doesn't make every report directly reviewable in Federal Court. For unionized workplaces, disciplinary disputes also remain connected to the collective agreement's grievance machinery. Neither point relieves employers of their workplace harassment responsibilities. Instead, the decision shows that the question of whether an investigation was sound is different from the question of which legal process can examine it.
Source: Federal Court reasons, Justice Duchesne, October 5, 2026, 2026 FC 1227, particularly paragraphs 33 to 51.