Howard Levitt: If Trudeau and Morneau were running a corporation, conflicts of interest in WE case would have led to their dismissal
But it wasn’t just the additional relationships which motivated McDonald’s to sue. It was the two types of ’cause’ which courts view most seriously in the employment law lexicon: dishonesty and conflict of interest. If there is a conflict, an employee must come clean and declare it. Most large companies have policies requiring employees to disclose if they are in a relationship. The purpose of that is so that one or both can be moved to positions where neither has influence over the others’ affairs in the company and the company can prevent them from granting benefits or providing internal references to the other.
I have a current case where an employee of an employer client was terminated for cause. One of the grounds is that she provided the name of her husband as a reference without disclosing their relationship. This was only learned well after her employment commenced. This example illustrates how conflict of interest veers into dishonesty.