Ruling says province failed to prove that arbitration agreement bound plaintiff
The Ontario Superior Court dismissed the provincial government’s motion to dismiss or stay the action against it, as no statute deprived the court of jurisdiction, and the plaintiff was not a party to a collective agreement containing the arbitration agreement.
In Jean-Marie Dixon v. The King (Ontario), 2025 ONSC 5828, the plaintiff brought an action seeking moral redress from her employer, the Ontario government. She alleged the following:
The plaintiff relied on reports that found the province’s public service consistently produced poor occupational outcomes for Black individuals despite the Ontario Human Rights Code, 1990, and good-faith efforts to establish a colour-blind environment.
The province moved to dismiss or stay the action. Ontario argued that the plaintiff was a party to an arbitration agreement in a collective agreement, which required the provincial government’s lawyers to submit workplace discrimination and harassment claims to private arbitration.
Ontario also asserted that the court should:
The court noted that the plaintiff and Ontario had a common law contract of employment. The court added that a tripartite collective agreement among the plaintiff, Ontario, and her association:
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice dismissed the motion to dismiss or stay the action. The court refused to dismiss the action for lack of jurisdiction, as no statute deprived it of jurisdiction.
The court noted that Weber addressed a privative clause usually seen in Canadian labour statutes, which suspended unionized workers’ rights to bargain individually with the employer and request redress for occupational complaints.
In this case, the court pointed out that the plaintiff did not belong to a certified union under Ontario law.
The court considered whether to stay the action under s. 7 of the Arbitration Act.
At the outset, the court noted that an arbitration agreement existed between the provincial government and the lawyer associations acting as bargaining units and that Ontario took no steps beyond moving for the stay.
The court ruled that Ontario failed to establish that the arbitration agreement was binding on the plaintiff.
Beyond the first two months of time-limited employment, the court said Ontario did not provide evidence that the plaintiff was a party to the collective agreement containing the arbitration agreement, which was a precondition for s. 7(1) of the Arbitration Act to apply.
The court noted that Ontario relied on the circumstantial evidence that it presumably would not have hired the plaintiff or appointed her to another role if she was not a party to the collective agreement.
The court found that Ontario’s assumption did not amount to arguable or prima facie proof of the contract of adhesion’s binding effect on the plaintiff under employment law principles.
Next, the court considered whether to stay the action on the basis that it arose from matters that the collective agreement required the parties to submit to arbitration.
The court held that the plaintiff’s allegations of specific breaches of her individual rights to equal treatment and freedom from discriminatory harassment would fall within the arbitrator’s adjudicative authority under art. 1A of the arbitration agreement.
However, the court said the plaintiff’s claims of widespread hostility to her group of female Black lawyers went beyond the individual anti-infringement mandate under art. 1, given the difference in subject-matter competencies between the Ontario Human Rights Commission and the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal.
The court concluded that it could not compel the plaintiff to bifurcate the action under s. 7(5) of the Arbitration Act.
