A Nova Scotia employer's own paperwork became its biggest problem, as a labour tribunal ruled a worker's day-to-day text messages were more believable than the company's official pay stubs and payroll record.
In a Sept. 3, 2026, decision, Nova Scotia Labour Board chair Jasmine Walsh dismissed an appeal from a Halifax-area drywall subcontractor and ordered it to pay a former drywall taper $5,241.60 in unpaid wages and vacation pay, upholding an order that had first come from the province's Director of Labour Standards.
The worker had been paid at an agreed rate of $24 an hour, and both sides accepted that his first pay period had been paid in full. The dispute began with the next pay period, when the subcontractor said it had paid him, but the worker said he received only a pay stub and no money. After that point, the subcontractor stopped paying him entirely, though the two sides disagreed sharply about how many hours he had worked in the weeks that followed.
The subcontractor argued the worker was still owed for about 59.5 additional hours. By the worker's count, the real shortfall was closer to 196 hours, more than three times as much. The gap between the two positions came down to a single question: whose record of hours worked would the board believe?
The subcontractor pointed to its own supervisor's daily time sheets, three pay stubs and a government Record of Employment. The worker, in turn, pointed to months of WhatsApp messages he...
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