The employer skipped one step before firing, and a tribunal made it pay
A positive cannabis test was enough for one safety-sensitive employer to fire an assistant operator the same day. It was not enough, a labour tribunal has now confirmed, to prove the company had just cause for the dismissal.
In a decision dated July 22, 2026, Vice-Chairperson Patricia Warwick of the Saskatchewan Labour Relations Board dismissed GFL Environmental Inc.'s appeal of a wage assessment issued in the worker's favour by the Director of Employment Standards. The ruling confirmed an earlier adjudicator's finding and left GFL owing $5,958.19 in wages tied to the notice period.
The test that triggered the termination
The worker had been employed by GFL as an assistant operator since June 2019, earning $27.57 an hour. His employment ended on February 14, 2025, the same day he took a drug test required under the company's drug and alcohol policy. The test came back positive for cannabis, and GFL treated the result as a violation of the policy and terminated him.
Under GFL's drug and alcohol policy, an employee who tests positive for an illicit drug consumed within 24 hours of starting work would be terminated. The worker had been tested seven times before, and although two of those earlier tests were positive for cannabis, the policy had not been applied because the consumption was found to have fallen outside the 24-hour window.
The worker offered a different account. He testified that he injured his finger at work on February 12, stayed home the next day, and took cannabis for the pain at about 2 a.m. on February 13. In text messages to a district manager after the test, he said he had consumed it outside the 24-hour window the policy targeted. No one at GFL, he said, asked him about the circumstances before the firing.
What the company argued on appeal
GFL took the matter to the Saskatchewan Labour Relations Board after an adjudicator upheld the wage assessment in December 2025. The company argued the adjudicator had answered the wrong legal question and had misapplied the test for just cause. In its view, the firing rested on a single positive drug test, not on when the cannabis was consumed.
Central to the dispute was how the lab characterized the sample, which evidence before the adjudicator described as "a positive result for the consumption of Cannabis within 24 hours." GFL maintained that an investigation into the surrounding circumstances was unnecessary. Because the worker held a safety sensitive position, the company argued, one positive drug test was enough to justify dismissal.
The Director countered that the adjudicator had it right. The correct question, the Director argued, was whether GFL had proven on a balance of probabilities that it had just cause to dismiss the worker. The adjudicator had identified the correct legal framework and applied it to the evidence, the Director submitted.
Why the firing failed the test
The Board sided with the Director. Vice-Chairperson Warwick found that the adjudicator had correctly identified the just cause test set out by the Supreme Court of Canada in McKinley v. B.C. Tel and later refined into three parts: identifying the nature and extent of the misconduct, weighing the surrounding circumstances, and deciding whether dismissal is a proportionate response.
In the Board's analysis, GFL had not completed the second and third steps. Warwick agreed with the adjudicator that the company conducted no investigation into the circumstances of the positive test and made no assessment of whether dismissal was proportionate. GFL's own policy, the decision noted, called for that kind of inquiry before discipline was imposed.
That failure left GFL unable to prove just cause. Even in a safety sensitive setting, the decision affirmed, a positive test on its own does not establish cause without an examination of the surrounding circumstances. As the adjudicator's decision put it, the company had "automatically terminated the employee's employment due to a non-negative result of the cannabis test."
See GFL Environmental Inc. v Director of Employment Standards and Daniel Parker, 2026 SKLRB 39
