The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario has rejected an attempt by the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board to have an application related to sexual harassment and disability discrimination in employment dismissed based on jurisdictional grounds.
The school board had argued that the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) held exclusive jurisdiction over the disability aspect of the claim due to an approved claim for chronic mental stress, which, according to them, should preclude the tribunal’s involvement under Section 45.1 of the Human Rights Code.
This section allows the tribunal to dismiss applications if the issues have been appropriately dealt with in another proceeding.
However, the applicant employee contended that the WSIB claim did not cover the full breadth of the allegations, which include the employer’s ongoing failure to accommodate their disability in various workplace situations — an issue distinct from the WSIB claim.
Denise Ghanam, the tribunal member overseeing the case, referred to the primacy of the Human Rights Code over other legislative enactments, as established in previous cases, and the Tribunal’s jurisdiction to hear the claim.
While acknowledging the school board’s concerns under Section 45.1, the tribunal granted a request for a preliminary hearing to determine if the WSIB proceedings had indeed substantively dealt with the matter in question.
The parties have been instructed to submit additional written evidence on this issue within 30 days, allowing the Tribunal to further consider the overlap between the WSIB’s resolution of the claim and the Human Rights Code’s protections against workplace discrimination.
For more information, see Cillis v. Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board, 2023 HRTO 1611 (CanLII)
