Employers hoped remote work would vanish with the pandemic. Employees quietly built their lives around it. Courts, meanwhile, have started defining its legal boundaries — often in ways employers never anticipated.
Across Canada, companies pushing sudden return-to-office mandates are colliding with employees who now view remote work as a contractual right — and in most cases it is.
Surveillance software has become the new battleground. Documentation — or the lack of it — is deciding dismissals. And judges are increasingly skeptical of employers who change major work terms without explanation.
This three-part package explains:
•Why remote workers keep winning in court
•How employers can stop losing these cases
•How employees can protect themselves and assert their rights
Remote work is not dying. It is maturing into one of the most consequential employment law fronts of this decade.
Canadian employers made one colossal mistake during the pandemic: they assumed remote work was a temporary indulgence. Courts took a very different view. They treated remote work as a bona fide employment term — one that employers now ignore at their legal peril.
And that is why, across the country, remote employees are quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) winning lawsuits. Not because judges prefer the work-from-home arrangement, but because employers keep forgetting the basics of employment law.
Let me explain.
Employers insist...
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