The lawyer who took on Tim Hortons for allegedly suppressing wages believes a key piece of his proposed class-action lawsuit fell apart because of a hole in Canada’s competition law when it comes to workers.
“It’s a gap that should have been filled years ago,” said David Klein, whose Vancouver-based Klein Lawyers LLP represents the plaintiff in a case that started in 2019 against the coffee chain.
He’s not the only one who has issues with the Competition Act. Progressives, labour advocates and the federal competition watchdog have a long list of grievances, but one of the top concerns is that the act doesn’t consider so-called no-poach and wage-fixing schemes to be criminal offences. Put another way: it’s criminal to fix the price of bread, but not wages.
The federal government has proposed to change that. In this spring’s budget bill, the Liberals included an amendment that would criminalize wage-fixing and no-poach schemes between employers. Legal scholars and policy wonks fear the change isn’t the silver bullet the government seems to think it is. But Klein said it would have helped his case against Tim Hortons.
“We would likely have been successful if that wording had been in the act when it was originally passed,” he said. “It would have had a direct impact on this case.”
The case started with Samir Latifi, a former staff member at a Tim Hortons in Surrey, B.C., who launched the class action in 2019 on behalf of all Tim...
Melania Trump on Thursday (April 9) issued an unexpected public statement denying any connection to Jeffrey Epstein, pushing back against what she described as long-running false claims circulatin...