Bailey is a dog. She boarded at an Ontario kennel in 2019, missed a dose of pre-surgery medication, and ended up deciding a human rights case.
The kennel’s operations manager was let go in December 2019 after roughly six months on the job. She had come in with a sprained right ankle from a car accident, disclosed it at hiring, and never asked for accommodation. She filed a human rights application alleging her termination was tied to that ankle, plus a failure to accommodate and reprisal. The tribunal dismissed all of it, and the reasoning is a useful reminder of what actually sinks these cases: not the medical condition, but the story built around it.
Start with the ankle. The manager told the tribunal at the hearing, for the first time, that she had suffered an “avulsion fracture.” Nothing in her application, her reply, her witness statement or her case summary had ever mentioned a fracture. The one contemporaneous medical record on file, a radiology report from May 2019, stated plainly that no fracture was seen.
She said a later x-ray showed the fracture. She never produced it, never called the doctor who supposedly ordered it, and the adjudicator drew an adverse inference from the gap. A post-termination physiotherapy report that did mention an avulsion fracture also referred to a right knee injury she said should have read left knee, and covered a single assessment despite her claim of twice-weekly physio for months. She said the records had been lost. The adjudicator did not buy it, partly because her own physiotherapy costs were being covered by her auto insurer, an arrangement that generates exactly the paperwork trail she said didn’t exist.
None of that alone would have doomed the case. The tribunal actually found, on the strength of a text exchange, that the kennel’s owner believed the manager had an injury serious enough to warrant lighter duties, which is enough to trigger the Code’s protection for perceived disability. The owner offered her customer service work so she could stay off her feet. She turned it down. The tribunal treated that offer as good faith, not tokenism, and noted that an employer proactively raising accommodation should not be punished for asking.
Dog’s medication
Bailey needed medication before surgery. The manager didn’t give it to her. When a colleague noticed the medication chart unsigned and the pills still in their package, the manager admitted she’d never given them, then threw the medication in the trash, pocketed the empty packaging, and handed the dog back to her owner without a word.
A colleague chased the owner into the parking lot to explain what had happened. The adjudicator called this the most damning piece of evidence in the file, and it is easy to see why: it is not a story about a missed task, it is a story about a decision to let a customer walk away from a health issue involving their pet rather than own the mistake.
The manager argued there was no other explanation for her firing besides the ankle, and pointed to the timing: she raised her medical situation, and was let go a week or two later. Timing is the easiest inference in employment law and the tribunal was unmoved by it here, because the kennel had something better than a paper trail: four witnesses who told a coherent, mutually consistent story about a manager who smoked behind a shed on breaks nobody could account for, left junior staff to manage 50 dogs alone, and, when finally asked point-blank in the hearing room about performance issues, answered “I guess you are talking about Bailey.”
Witness accounts
The kennel had almost no documentation to back any of this up. It had migrated systems and apparently never went looking in the old database, which the adjudicator noted with some irritation. It didn’t matter.
Four witnesses, kept out of the hearing room during each other’s testimony, gave accounts that lined up on the details that counted and diverged only on the ones that didn’t, which is what credible memory actually looks like six years on. The manager’s lawyer tried to sell the tribunal on a coordinated story. The tribunal wasn’t having it.
The lesson for employers isn’t that documentation doesn’t matter, it clearly still does, and this kennel got lucky that its witnesses held up without it. The lesson is that trust, once an employee spends it on hiding a mistake from a customer, doesn’t come back through a human rights complaint. The manager may well have been treated unfairly by colleagues who didn’t like her, and the tribunal said as much without needing to resolve it. Unlikeable is not illegal.
What killed her case was a dog that never got her medicine, an owner who almost drove home without knowing, and a manager who decided silence was the better option. Juries and tribunals alike tend to remember who told the truth about the dog.
