'Making employees miserable is not the purpose of the duty to accommodate’
A federal employee asked to keep working from home. His employer offered a noise-cancelling headset instead. A labour tribunal says that answer badly missed the point of his disability.
In a decision released June 19, 2026, adjudicator Christopher Rootham of the Federal Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board ruled that Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) failed to reasonably accommodate an engineer's post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Rootham ordered the department to let the employee keep working remotely, pay roughly two years of lost wages, and cover $28,000 in human rights damages for reckless conduct.
The employee, a computer engineer who develops software and cloud systems for a federal research unit in Ottawa, has PTSD marked by hypervigilance and a pervasive sense of being unsafe, according to his medical team's evidence. He worked from home for nearly four years starting early in the pandemic, and was promoted twice in that time.
When a 2022 government policy requiring public servants to return to offices two to three days a week took effect, he asked to keep working remotely as a disability accommodation.
But the employer proposed three measures for use in the office: a noise-cancelling headset, a workstation away from the flow of other employees, and permission to come in on quieter days. It maintained those...
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