Bell's ‘swipe-and-go’ firings put RTO enforcement under legal scrutiny

One employee allegedly used his office badge to access the gym before heading home. Another swiped in just before midnight and again just after, logging two apparent workdays without spending a meaningful minute at his desk. 

These incidents, reported by The Globe and Mail, are among the cases at the centre of a growing controversy involving BCE, Bell Canada's parent company, which has terminated a number of corporate employees for what it calls “deliberate and repeated falsification of workplace attendance.” 

The firings – which occurred at offices across the country and affected only non-unionized staff – have put the tension between return-to-office (RTO) mandates and remote work expectations on display. They have also raised pointed questions about whether BCE's approach to enforcement was legally sound, or whether it has exposed the company to significant liability. 

RTO mandates and ‘coffee badging’ 

BCE's policy requires most corporate employees to be in the office three days a week, reported CBC News. The practice at the centre of the firings – badging in and promptly leaving – has become widely known as "coffee badging," and BCE says it won’t tolerate it. 

In a statement provided to HRD Canada and other media, BCE said each termination followed “a thorough investigation and individuals were presented with clear evidence of their misconduct.” The company also said that “the majority of individuals admitted to deliberate and repeated falsification of workplace attendance.” 

BCE's chief human resources officer, Nikki Moffat, echoed that message internally, telling staff in an email obtained by CBC News that terminated employees had been “misrepresenting their presence in the workplace.” 

But that account is being contested by fired workers – and an employment lawyer who's getting involved. 

Condonation ‘entirely negates the cause’: lawyer 

Jean-Alexandre De Bousquet, founder of De Bousquet PC Barristers and Solicitors in Toronto, says he’s been retained by more than 30 terminated Bell employees and believes the true number of dismissals could run into the hundreds. He claims fired BCE workers have contacted him from Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec, and he’s in the process of filing multiple claims on their behalf. 

His clients' accounts diverge sharply from BCE's. Many of them, he says, had explicit approval from their own managers for the very working arrangements they were terminated for. “Many of those employees were told to do this by their own managers,” says De Bousquet.  

Under Canadian employment law, that distinction matters. If managerial condonation of the behaviour in fact happened, “it entirely negates the cause,” says De Bousquet. In addition, for-cause dismissal – reserved for the most serious workplace misconduct – requires an employer to demonstrate that no lesser form of discipline would have been appropriate, he says. 

Procedural failures in investigation 

According to De Bousquet, there were also serious procedural failures in how BCE conducted its investigation. “Most people were ambushed into surprise meetings and told, ‘Well, 62 days ago you were late – please explain that’ – of course, nobody remembers what they did exactly 62 days ago,” he says. “Calling an employee into a surprise meeting without telling them what they're being accused of beforehand is the employment law equivalent of the police breaking down your door without a warrant." 

De Bousquet also says that some employees had already received formal warnings and had corrected their behaviour before being terminated anyway. “You can't give somebody a warning and then change your mind and decide to change the warning into a termination,” he says. 

To terminate with cause – which De Bousquet describes as “the capital punishment of employment law” – an employer must demonstrate that no lesser form of discipline would have been appropriate. In his view, BCE failed to meet that bar on multiple fronts: condonation by management, lack of procedural fairness, and prior discipline that wasn’t followed through to termination.  

“Even if Bell had cause to terminate those people – which it probably didn't – the fact that they didn’t follow due process during the investigation and didn’t have procedural patterns during the investigation would probably prevent them entirely from relying on cause,” says De Bousquet. 

BCE, for its part, has said that managers who condoned swipe-and-go activity were also investigated and fired. 

Misconduct or a cost-cutting exercise? 

For HR leaders across Canada, the most significant allegation may be the broadest one: that the misconduct framing is a pretext for economic layoffs designed to avoid paying severance. “This is something that I see more and more happening over the last couple of years,” says De Bousquet. “In the past, an employer would not allege cause, even if perhaps they had good reasons to be unhappy with an employee, but employers are now alleging cause – and often falsely – because they hope that the employee will just walk away and not ask for severance.” 

His reasoning is straightforward. When a genuine misconduct termination occurs, the role being vacated still needs to be filled. “If all of those people were terminated for misconduct, and there's probably over a hundred of them if not hundreds, then you would see 100 job postings come popping up because Bell would be needing to replace all of these people as soon as possible,” says De Bousquet. “My understanding is that none of these people are being replaced and their positions are being eliminated.” 

The scale of the dismissals also strains BCE's credibility on the misconduct argument itself, according to De Bousquet. “If hundreds of people were doing it, how is it possible that the company had no idea?” he says. “If you have one employee engaging in misconduct, an employer can always say that this employee was a bad apple – but now it's like they had hundreds of bad apples.” 

BCE hasn’t disclosed how many employees were dismissed, describing it in the statement as “a small number of individual cases for clear violations of our code of conduct.” 

The firings arrive months after Bell cut hundreds of positions in late 2025 as part of a broader effort to reduce debt, and as BCE reported mixed first-quarter financial results this year. 

Clarity on monitoring and reasons for RTO 

Ashlee Langlois, CEO and Registrar of CPHR Saskatchewan, says the BCE case highlights a principle HR leaders should be applying long before any investigation is launched: transparency about how attendance data is being collected and used. 

“If you're going to be using that data – access card data or other passive monitoring tools – I think it needs to be transparent that that information is being tracked,” says Langlois. “Transparency is key.” 

But Langlois also frames the broader issue as one of culture rather than compliance. For HR leaders navigating RTO mandates, the more durable solution is building an in-office environment that employees genuinely want to be part of – not one they are compelled or surveilled into attending, she says. 

"When we were really clear that time spent in the office was about connection and collaboration, and making time and space for that, that framing helped,” Langlois says. "I would hear from staff members, 'I'm so much less efficient when I come into the office than when I’m at home,' but the work, the collaboration, the culture building, the team building, those water cooler conversations – that's all part of work as well – it just looks a little different, it's not widget making.” 

Her counsel to HR teams is to be intentional about what in-office time is designed to achieve. “The more deliberate we are about our in-office time together, I think the better,” she says. 

RTO mandates accelerating 

The BCE case is unfolding against a backdrop of accelerating RTO enforcement across Canada, with federal public servants set to attend the office four days a week beginning in July. 

Enforcing RTO mandates has been an issue in employment law for a few years, according to De Bousquet. “It's different for different workplaces and different employees, because some people perhaps always worked remote even before the pandemic, so it's difficult for an employer to recall those people who never worked in person in the first place,” he says.  
“Whereas there are some people who initially worked in person, then worked from home expecting this to be a temporary measure, and those people never realistically expected that they would be working from home until the end of time – but it’s been a challenge for employers because many employees are now expecting to continue working from home.” 

For organizations watching closely, the lesson may be less about the behaviour of the employees involved and more about the considerable legal and cultural cost of getting RTO enforcement wrong: “Termination for cause should only be in the clearest of cases, as a last resort,” says De Bousquet.