“It’s important to involve all parties in the accommodation process and make sure communications with an employee are clear and well documented – whenever there’s uncertainty about an employee’s status or the possibility of a miscommunication, it’s very important to have a documentary trail to support any action that the company is going to take.”
So says labour and employment lawyer Nathanael Bowles of McLennan Ross in Calgary, after an arbitrator found that both an employer and a dismissed employee failed to live up to their obligations in the accommodation process, leading to reinstatement of the worker without damages.
The worker was a locomotive engineer hired by Canadian Pacific Kansas City Railway (CPR) in 2004.
