Overlapping Jurisdiction and Access to Administrative Justice: Université McGill c. Ong, 2014 QCCA 458

There are two interesting aspects to Université McGill c. Ong, 2014 QCCA 458, a technical aspect about administrative-law doctrine and a substantive aspect about access to administrative justice.

O was an employee of McGill University until she was dismissed for mishandling cash and impeding an investigation into missing funds. She vigorously contested the dismissal before the Commission des relations du travail. But she also pursued an arbitration option made available by the University's dispute resolution policy, a policy incorporated into her contract of employment.

She thus ran into s. 124 of the Loi sur les normes du travail, which allows an employee such as O to contest a dismissal before the Commission except:

where a remedial procedure, other than a recourse in damages, is provided elsewhere in this Act, in another Act or in an agreement.

Alternative procedures have to be equivalent to the Commission's procedures in order to trigger this provision. Did the arbitration procedure contained in the university's dispute resolution policy oust the jurisdiction of the Commission?

The Commission concluded that it did not because the employee had to foot half of the arbitrator's bill. Whereas the Commission grants free access to eligible employees, who may, moreover, benefit from being represented by another regulatory agency during the process.

Emphasizing the desirability of access to justice, Thibault J.A. agreed with the Commission. An inaccessible remedy is not an effective remedy:

[66]        En donnant effet à la volonté clairement exprimée par le législateur de permettre à un salarié d’avoir accès à un décideur gratuit en cas de congédiement sans cause juste et suffisante, la CRT s’est assurée de l’efficacité du recours de l’article 124 LNT. Elle a jugé qu’un recours non accessible n’est pas un recours efficace. Cette interprétation n’est pas désincarnée; elle témoigne du souci de la CRT de tenir compte de la vulnérabilité du salarié congédié qui ne peut pas compter sur l’assistance financière de son association accréditée (ou, le cas échéant, d’une autre association qui lui procure des avantages similaires) pour payer les frais d’arbitrage et le représenter.

Interestingly, Thibault J.A. recalled the emphasis recently placed by the Supreme Court of Canada on access to justice in Hryniak v. Mauldin, 2014 SCC 7, a landmark case involving the criteria for granting summary judgment:

[1]                              Ensuring access to justice is the greatest challenge to the rule of law in Canada today.  Trials have become increasingly expensive and protracted.  Most Canadians cannot afford to sue when they are wronged or defend themselves when they are sued, and cannot afford to go to trial.  Without an effective and accessible means of enforcing rights, the rule of law is threatened.

One could be cynical about whether Hryniak was about access to justice or access to judges, but this case makes clear that the Supreme Court's message has been widely received. Sometimes, if not most of the time, access to justice requires access to administrative justice (see also this post by Ian Mackenzie). A timely reminder, then, from the Quebec Court of Appeal.

Now for the technical aspect. The Commission's interpretation of s. 124 (a provision of its constitutive statute) was reviewed on a correctness standard:

[41]        Cette question, éminemment reliée au droit du travail, nécessite une comparaison entre deux recours pour vérifier si les décideurs visés ont la même capacité de réviser la décision de l’employeur, pour mettre en parallèle leurs pouvoirs de réparation, pour examiner le cadre procédural de chacun des recours et pour vérifier s’ils présentent une efficacité comparable. Ce travail de comparaison implique une connaissance intime du mécanisme de réparation de la LNT. Il fait aussi partie des éléments dont la CRT a une connaissance approfondie en raison de la mission qui lui est législativement confiée.

[42]        Mais, lorsque l’exercice a pour conséquence de délimiter la compétence de deux tribunaux spécialisés, ou que la question en est une d'importance pour le système juridique en général, il faut conclure que la norme de la décision correcte s’applique. C’est ce qu’a fait la Cour suprême dans SFPQ précitée. Se posait la question de savoir qui, de l’arbitre de grief ou de la CRT, devait entendre le recours de deux salariés (justifiant de deux ans de service continu) à qui la convention collective applicable niait le droit de grief en cas de congédiement sans cause juste et suffisante.

Once again the difficulty of assigning a question to one of the correctness or reasonableness categories established by the Supreme Court of Canada rears its head. Plainly the Commission was interpreting a provision of its constitutive statute, which presumptively attracts deference and was in any event well within the field of its expertise. Yet in interpreting s. 124 it had to determine whether it or the arbitrator had jurisdiction to hear O's complaint, a matter of overlapping jurisdiction which is to be resolved by the ordinary courts.

So what category does the decision fall into? We still lack a stable set of factors which would indicate how reviewing courts are to classify decisions. In the absence of guidance on how and when the presumption of reasonableness review of interpretations of constitutive statutes can be rebutted (or the outright abolition of correctness review!) difficult questions of classification are likely to recur and receive different treatment from different courts.

UPDATE: I hit "publish" too soon. Thibault J.A. relied in part on Supreme Court precedent to justify the application of the correctness standard. But in Syndicat de la fonction publique du Québec v. Quebec (Attorney General), 2010 SCC 28, standard of review was not really discussed. Moreover, as the Court said recently in Agraira (at para. 48), "if the relevant precedents appear to be inconsistent with recent developments in the common law principles of judicial review" previous case law may not be helpful. Given that the presumption of reasonableness review for interpretations of home statutes post-dates the 2010 case, it does not give strong support to the Court of Appeal's choice of the correctness standard.