Board finds worker's text messages beat the company's own paperwork
A Nova Scotia employer's own paperwork became its biggest problem, as a labour tribunal ruled a worker's day-to-day text messages were more believable than the company's official pay stubs and payroll record.
In a Sept. 3, 2026, decision, Nova Scotia Labour Board chair Jasmine Walsh dismissed an appeal from a Halifax-area drywall subcontractor and ordered it to pay a former drywall taper $5,241.60 in unpaid wages and vacation pay, upholding an order that had first come from the province's Director of Labour Standards.
A pay dispute over hours worked
The worker had been paid at an agreed rate of $24 an hour, and both sides accepted that his first pay period had been paid in full. The dispute began with the next pay period, when the subcontractor said it had paid him, but the worker said he received only a pay stub and no money. After that point, the subcontractor stopped paying him entirely, though the two sides disagreed sharply about how many hours he had worked in the weeks that followed.
The subcontractor argued the worker was still owed for about 59.5 additional hours. By the worker's count, the real shortfall was closer to 196 hours, more than three times as much. The gap between the two positions came down to a single question: whose record of hours worked would the board believe?
The subcontractor pointed to its own supervisor's daily time sheets, three pay stubs and a government Record of Employment. The worker, in turn, pointed to months of WhatsApp messages he said he sent daily, logging his hours and job site as he worked.
Company records unravel under scrutiny
Walsh and the board found that close inspection of the subcontractor's paperwork turned up serious problems. The pay stubs did not match the supervisor's own hour counts, nor did they match figures the company itself had texted to the worker at the time. Walsh's board concluded the pay stubs were unreliable.
The Record of Employment fared no better. It listed 187 insurable hours and three pay amounts that lined up with neither the pay stubs nor either side's account of hours worked. Her board found that record unreliable too.
The board preferred the worker's WhatsApp messages instead, calling them an ongoing, dated record the subcontractor never challenged at the time. It maintained the worker's hours “were not always accurate,” but Walsh found no evidence it had ever raised that concern with him directly, and no explanation for why the two records suddenly diverged once payments stopped.
Wages, deductions and the board's ruling
The subcontractor also argued the worker had been paid twice, not once, for those early pay periods. Walsh disagreed, finding no bank records were produced to prove the second payment had ever gone through, and drawing an adverse inference that it had not. In the end, she found the worker had gone unpaid for 210 of 270 hours worked, awarding $5,040 in wages plus $201.60 in vacation pay.
The subcontractor separately argued that $2,200 it had given the worker as an advance for rent and a security deposit should be treated as a loan and deducted from what he was owed. Her board rejected that too, finding no statute, contract or court order gave the company authority to make such a deduction under the Labour Standards Code. A previous Nova Scotia Supreme Court ruling, she noted, had found that wages are “a special debt protected from set off” for any cause an employer may hold against an employee.
The appeal was dismissed. Walsh ordered the subcontractor to pay $5,241.60 in total, subject to standard statutory deductions.
See 13004279 Canada Inc. (Kudrat Services) v Singh Lail, 2026 NSLB 123
