In June 2024, a worker at a lumber mill on Annacis Island in Delta, B.C., asked for three days of paid bereavement leave. His wife had delivered a stillborn daughter at more than 20 weeks. They had known she was a girl. They had named her. They held a funeral and a burial.
The company said no. It gave him three unpaid days, and he covered the rest of that week with paid sick days. The union grieved. Two years and 181 paragraphs later, an arbitrator has ruled that a stillbirth is a death under the collective agreement and that the leave should have been granted.
CIPA Lumber’s argument deserves a fair hearing, because it was a real one. Under B.C.’s Vital Statistics Act, a birth requires signs of life after delivery: breathing, a heartbeat, a pulse in the umbilical cord. A stillbirth, by definition, has none. The province issues no death certificate for one, only a Stillbirth Certificate of Remembrance. The employer reasoned from there. No birth, therefore no death, therefore no claim under a bereavement clause that applies “when death occurs.”
It also cited an Ontario Court of Appeal definition of death and pointed to newer stillbirth provisions in the employment standards laws of four provinces and in the Canada Labour Code. It warned that paying bereavement leave on top of pregnancy leave would amount to “pyramiding” of benefits.
Missing the point completely
This is the kind of reasoning that holds together internally and misses the point entirely. The grievor is a man. He was never eligible for pregnancy leave. On the employer’s reading he would have received no paid leave of any kind, which the arbitrator described as “the complete elimination of a negotiated benefit.”
Then there was the concession. CIPA accepted that if the baby had been born alive and lived even briefly, her father would have qualified. On the company’s theory, then, his entitlement depended on which side of delivery her heart stopped. A policy that pays a grieving parent if his daughter lived a few minutes, and not if she died a few minutes earlier, protects the business from nothing.
I don’t know the history between management and the union at CIPA. Labour relations are a long game, and positions harden for reasons unrelated to the grievance at hand. Some employers fear that any flexibility on a clause becomes a precedent. Some employees absolutely do abuse bereavement leave. (It’s an old joke, but remember this one? “The best part about starting a new job is that both of your grandparents are alive again.”)
In this B.C. case, there was no evidence that the leave would disrupt production, drive up costs or come up often. There was no bargaining history showing anyone had ever tried to carve out stillbirths. The employer itself acknowledged the loss was considerable and devastating. Nobody disputed the grief. The dispute was over whether the grief qualified.
Embarassing sums
The sums involved are small enough to be embarrassing: three days at the straight-time rate. The company paid him sick days that same week anyway. Against that it has funded counsel through an arbitration that is only half finished. The parties split the hearing in two to keep the family’s medical details private, and unless they settle, a second stage is still to come.
There was a warning on the books, too. In 2008, the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal found that a father’s complaint about being denied bereavement leave because his daughter was stillborn or died shortly after birth would, if proven, amount to discrimination on the basis of family status. The arbitrator relied on that decision in finding CIPA’s denial discriminatory. The employer was not merely ungenerous. In the end, it was also wrong on the law.
The legal loss is still the less interesting failure. Legal arguments tend to be built after someone has settled on the outcome they want. The decision that mattered came first, in June 2024. Somebody at the mill received that request, understood what had happened to this man’s family and chose the unpaid option. Somebody then had to tell him. The Vital Statistics Act did not require any of that, and neither did the collective agreement. At most, the company believed the agreement allowed it.
Do the right thing
A collective agreement sets out what an employer must provide. It is silent on what an employer may choose to provide beyond that. Nothing stopped CIPA from granting the leave and, if it truly feared a precedent, raising the definition of death at the next round of bargaining. The arbitrator pointed the company to the bargaining table for its pyramiding worry, which is where that conversation belonged all along. The contract was a floor. The company treated it as a ceiling, then paid lawyers to argue the floor sat lower than it looked.
The arbitrator summed up the employer’s case in a single line: there were “no sound reasons for the denial in evidence,” only its contention that a stillbirth was not a death.
The ruling has now settled what the clause means. What the company meant by it, every worker at that mill already knows.
