The complaint failed, the worker wasn't believed, so why did this employer still pay

An arbitrator found that a worker had not been harassed by a colleague, yet ordered her employer, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), to pay her damages for the way it handled her complaints.

In a decision dated May 4, 2026, Grievance Settlement Board arbitrator Diane Gee found that LCBO customer service representative Maria Bauer had not been harassed, rejecting much of Bauer's own account as not credible. Gee nonetheless ordered the employer to pay $4,500 in general damages: it had not investigated one of her three complaints at all, and had never given her the results of the other two in writing.

Two co-workers who couldn’t get along

Bauer, a customer service representative and Beer Ambassador at a Markham store, worked alongside another representative who served as the store's product consultant. The two had a mutual dislike that other staff noticed, and between October 2018 and September 2019 Bauer filed complaints alleging that the co-worker bullied and harassed her and that the LCBO failed to investigate properly.

The complaints stemmed from a handful of episodes. Two were heated exchanges, in October 2018 and June 2019, in which voices were raised and, on the later occasion, the co-worker called Bauer a derogatory name. A January 2019 episode saw the co-worker report that Bauer had taken home beer a sales representative brought into the store, and an August 2019 dispute...

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