A mine operating in a safety sensitive environment required workers to disclose drug dependency before an incident occurred. The policy offered employees an opportunity to obtain help without automatic discipline if they came forward. Ian Stewart used cocaine but didn't disclose his dependency. After an accident at work, he tested positive and was dismissed for breaching the policy. He argued that addiction was a disability and that his dismissal amounted to discrimination.
The Alberta human rights tribunal accepted that Stewart had a disability, but found his termination resulted from breaching the policy rather than from the disability itself. The dispute reached the Supreme Court of Canada in Stewart v. Elk Valley Coal Corp., 2017 SCC 30, where the judges did not all follow the same reasoning. That division is an essential part of understanding the case.
The Chief Justice, writing for the leading reasons, found the tribunal's causal conclusion reasonable. The reviewing court wasn't entitled to replace the tribunal's permissible interpretation of the evidence with its own. Two concurring judges approached the case differently. They considered that prima facie discrimination was established but concluded the employer had satisfied its accommodation duty on the record. Justice Gascon dissented, viewing the tribunal's treatment of addiction and causation as problematic.
The employee's appeal was dismissed. The result doesn't mean an employer can avoid human rights obligations simply by calling a termination a breach of policy. Nor does it mean addiction can never contribute to a failure to disclose. The decision turned on the tribunal's findings, the policy's prevention and assistance features, and the particular evidence about the employee's actions.
Workplace safety and disability accommodation often require simultaneous attention. This case illustrates the importance of a credible policy, an actual route to assistance, consistent implementation and a careful inquiry into why an employee acted as they did. Its reasoning should be read with the differing opinions in mind rather than reduced to a universal rule about drug testing or dismissal.
Primary source: Supreme Court of Canada, Stewart v. Elk Valley Coal Corp., 2017 SCC 30, https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/16679/index.do