The insurance producer’s manager knew what to say. When she told him, in August 2021, that a client’s representative had taken to following her car home along the highway, he was sympathetic. He agreed she should not have to endure it.
He said he would come up with a plan, and asked whether he might run the matter past his wife, who was good at this sort of thing, he said. She agreed. Then he and his wife left for vacation, and the plan never came.
This is the failure at the centre of a wrongful dismissal case out of British Columbia that HR Law Canada reported on this week. I would put this case in front of anyone who manages people. The producer worked at a Mission, B.C., brokerage, Johnston Meier Insurance Agencies. She was hired in 2014, a single mother, and good at her job. For years she had been stalked by the representative of one of the firm’s largest clients, the man who was also her point of contact on the account.
She reported it early. She set up safeguards at the office. By the summer of 2021 the man was waiting in the work parking lot, loitering near her home, and following her on the highway. She had gone to the police, who told her there was little they could do unless he stepped onto her property.
So she went to her employer, which is what employees are told to do. What she got was sympathy and then silence.
Her manager was not a monster; the court was clear on that, and declined to award punitive damages precisely because his conduct, while insensitive and unprofessional, was not malicious. He simply did not do the things he had the authority to do. He could have contacted the client’s employer about its representative’s behaviour. He could have moved the account to another office, an option he later admitted was viable and that he was willing to pursue, had he pursued it.
He could have let her work remotely, something she had done before, through the pandemic. He did none of it. In the court’s dry phrasing, he did nothing beyond asking permission to consult his wife, whose advice, on the account the court accepted, amounted to blaming the broker for her own situation.
What he did do was cut her pay. And the timing was telling. In September 2021, in the middle of all this, her boss reduced her monthly draw from $10,000 to $7,000, a $36,000 annual cut. He instructed payroll to make the reduction on Sept. 8, the day before he called her into his office to discuss whether she might accept one.
He later denied that order of events; but the payroll date contradicted him. She discovered the cut on her cheque a week later, with no notice. When she asked for a week of vacation to cope, he told her to take medical leave instead, and when she clarified that she wanted a vacation, he told her to drop her attitude.
A threat that arrives off the clock, from outside the building, might feel like someone else’s problem. Or the employee’s own. It is tempting to file it under personal misfortune rather than workplace hazard. The law does not permit that comfort.
A supervisor in British Columbia has a duty under the Workers Compensation Act to ensure a worker’s health and safety and to remedy hazardous conditions, and the court found the manager breached it. The stalking originated in a client relationship the firm profited from and went on profiting from.
It was, in the most literal sense, the firm’s business.
The firm treated it as its business only where the profit was concerned. While the producer was off work with post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression, the brokerage renewed its contracts with the stalker’s employer, and the manager took over her commissions from the account. Business as usual, he called it. Human resources offered little of substance. When she raised being bullied, the HR manager likened a WorkSafeBC claim to suing her boss, and never seriously looked into it.
That termination is where the strategy really curdled. The firm fired her in 2022 and argued frustration of contract: her injuries, it said, had made the job impossible through no one’s fault, an event beyond anyone’s control. The court rejected this without much difficulty.
You cannot contribute to the incapacity and then claim it as an act of God. Frustration is a stringent defence, the judge noted, and stringent for a reason, since it lets an employer walk away from a worker through no fault of that worker’s own. Here the fault was partly the employer’s, so the defence failed. The producer was awarded nine months’ pay, $116,136, with her disability benefits left untouched because the court found they compensated her injury rather than her lost wages.
The court declined to call any of this cruelty. The firm had been insensitive and unprofessional, it found, not malicious, and the distinction saved it money.
For the broker the distinction was academic. Her career in insurance was over, her health permanently altered, and the man who caused it kept his account. Indifference and malice had delivered her to the same place. One of them just came cheaper.
