He asked for a couple of days to see a doctor. The call didn't go the way he expected
For years, a trucking company insisted its truck driver was an independent contractor. When he fell ill and asked for a couple of days off, the relationship ended abruptly on a phone call. A court would later find he had been an employee all along.
Justice A.P. Argento of the Alberta Court of Justice, in a decision dated June 29, 2026, awarded the driver a net judgment of $44,603.93 after finding he had been wrongfully dismissed. The company had treated him as a contractor for eight years and two months, but the court found that label was not determinative.
The contractor label that didn't hold up
The driver started in November 2014, signing what the company called a rental agreement for the truck he would drive. He was hired to run bread deliveries for the company's main customer, a bakery, and by 2016 had settled into a five-day-a-week route to Edmonton. The company issued him subcontractor tax slips and made no statutory deductions.
Justice Argento worked through the factors courts use to tell employees from contractors: control over the work, who owns the equipment, and who stands to profit. The company supplied the truck, paid its insurance, fuel, registration and maintenance, and set the driver's rates and routes. He worked only for the company for over eight years, hired no helpers, and carried no business risk.
The court found the driver was an employee, not an independent contractor. The Canada Revenue Agency had reached the same conclusion after a payroll audit, ruling him an employee for 2022 and issuing a T4. How the parties labelled the relationship, the judge noted, was not determinative.
A phone call, two very different stories
The driver became ill in December 2022 and took two weeks off. He returned briefly, then called the company in late January to say he was unwell and needed time to see a doctor. Within weeks he was diagnosed with heart failure, has not worked since, and testified he is on a transplant list.
The two sides told sharply different versions of that final call. The driver testified that when he explained he needed to see a doctor, the owner told him, "No, no, you're done. You're done." The owner testified instead that the driver said he was tired and quit. The general manager was not on the call, and her account struck the judge as inconsistent.
Justice Argento preferred the driver's account, finding he was terminated, not resigned. The judge pointed to his long service, the lack of any conflict, and the fact that he had no other job lined up and everything to lose. A letter the company wrote for his EI claim, describing him as a contractor let go "due to his declining health," undercut its position that he had quit, the judge found.
How the award added up
The company argued the claim was too late under the Limitations Act, saying the driver should have known years earlier that he was treated as a contractor. The judge rejected that, reasoning that a wrongful dismissal claim cannot expire before the dismissal has even happened. The limitations defence failed.
The court settled on seven months of reasonable notice rather than the twelve the driver sought, awarding $44,461.06 based on his 2022 salary of $76,219. It declined vacation pay for the notice period and refused $25,000 in punitive damages, finding the company acted on a mistaken understanding rather than malice. A separate $2,242.87 covered unpaid vacation pay, offset by $2,100 the court found owing on the company's counterclaim.
The driver had also gone years without vacation pay while classified as a contractor, and the court addressed where responsibility lay. "It is irrelevant that this was inadvertent rather than intentional as the result is the same," Justice Argento wrote. The net judgment came to $44,603.93, plus interest running from his termination in January 2023.
