“It’s of little use to consider challenging either the veracity of [an employee’s] honestly held belief or the tenets of the restrictions they’ve requested, where there’s some connection to a religious belief. The focus of the employer’s response should be determining if there’s accommodation available or if you’ve met the point of undue hardship.”
So says Michael Horvat, a partner in the Workplace Law Group at Aird & Berlis in Toronto, after an arbitrator found that a railway company failed to accommodate a worker who refused a vaccine mandate due to religious reasons.
The worker was a rail traffic controller for Canadian National Railway (CN). On Oct. 29, 2021, Transport Canada issued a ministerial order that required employees in the rail industry to be vaccinated against COVID-19. The order allowed for exemptions on medical or religious grounds.
