Sask. judge rules Regina refinery was justified firing 2 workers who wouldn't follow pandemic protocols

A Saskatoon judge has ruled that Consumers' Co-operative Refineries Ltd. (CCRL) did not overstep when it fired two workers at its Regina plant after they refused to follow pandemic protocols.

Dallas Shuparski and Ward Rubin refused to comply with CCRL policy on vaccination and testing in October 2021. They were fired in January 2022.

The decision by Justice Richard Danyliuk overturns an arbitrator's decision that had ruled in favour of the workers. Unifor Local 594 had successfully grieved their firing, then CCRL requested a judicial review.

Danyliuk released his decision on March 5.

"Two employees were willing to jeopardize the health and safety of everyone else in that workplace. Two employees were given multiple chances to comply, multiple warnings, multiple stages of progressive discipline, and still insisted they were entitled to disobey a valid directive from their employer," Danyliuk wrote.

"Two employees were determined to maintain a course of conduct that was untenable, that sowed chaos in their workplace at a time when one of the largest health threats in recent memory was active in this country, in the world."

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In his 19-page Court of King's Bench decision, Danyliuk highlights what he characterized as flaws in the arbitrator's analysis.

The arbitrator decided that CCRL did not balance the competing interests of employer and employees, instead preferring its own interests and failing to "properly account for the profound loss these employees would suffer through termination." Also, the arbitrator ruled the terminations were premature, with a better option being to place the workers on an unpaid leave of absence, Danyliuk wrote.

A significant flaw, Danyliuk said, is that the arbitrator had noted that the CCRL policy was flexible compared with other companies. It did not demand that workers get vaccinated. Rather, it gave a "soft option" of testing. All the workers had to do was test themselves twice weekly and submit the results.

Further, neither worker provided any good reason to refuse to comply, Danyliuk said.

Finally, he wrote that by challenging the enforcement of the policy, the policy would also come under attack. This shifted the focus away from the real issue of whether the workers were unjustly fired.

"I acknowledge employers need to be reasonable with their employees but the converse is also true. Here, the course of action taken by Messrs. Rubin and Shuparski was unreasonable," Danyliuk wrote.

"It was a course destined to bring them to the point of termination."