Human rights tribunal sides with Pepsico over paid leave, firing dispute
An Ontario human rights tribunal has thrown out a worker's claim that she was punished for filing a discrimination complaint, even though her employer placed her on an indefinite paid leave weeks after she came forward.
In a decision released Aug. 14, 2026, Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario vice-chair Anthony Michael Tamburro dismissed the application, ruling that the employee, a former research and development co-ordinator at PepsiCo Foods Canada, had not shown that the company's handling of her case, including a lengthy paid medical leave and her eventual firing, amounted to reprisal for exercising her rights under the Human Rights Code.
Race and disability claims never made it to a hearing
The application, filed in 2016, alleged discrimination in employment based on race. But the employee's evidence at the three-day hearing centred almost entirely on reprisal and a failure to accommodate, not race, and Tamburro found nothing in the record to back the original allegation, dismissing it outright.
Her closing submissions also raised a failure to accommodate her medical needs, but the application had only ever named race as a ground of discrimination. Tamburro turned down a late request to add disability as a ground, pointing to how far the case had already progressed, how much the change would have altered its scope, and the disadvantage it would create for an employer that had shown up unprepared to defend against a disability claim.
He did note the company might not have fully met its procedural duty to accommodate, since an employer is required to gather information about an employee's condition and capabilities once health concerns surface. But since that issue was never properly part of the application, he said, it wasn't his to decide.
A paid leave followed a discrimination complaint
The dispute centred on a March 2016 letter in which the company's director of human resources placed the employee on an indefinite paid medical leave, about six weeks after she filed her human rights application. The employer maintained the leave was meant to protect her wellbeing, not punish her for coming forward, telling her in the letter that "your well-being is the priority."
Tamburro sided with the employer on this point, writing that "the medical leave was intended to assist the applicant rather than to punish her." He pointed out that she kept receiving full pay and benefits for almost 11 months, from the start of her leave until her termination in January 2017, calling that hard to square with an intent to punish.
That termination came with restructuring cited as the reason, though the employee said the explanation didn't hold up since another employee kept her old job for months afterward. The company argued the timing cut against a reprisal finding too, since nearly a year had passed since she first filed her complaint. Tamburro wasn't convinced there was enough evidence either way to call the firing, which included a 33-week salary continuance, retaliatory.
Paperwork errors were called sloppy, not vindictive
The employee also pointed to a string of clerical errors as proof of reprisal. Records of employment issued after her leave began wrongly stated that she had quit, a mistake later corrected. A third-party firm, not the company itself, had prepared those records.
She was also sent two letters demanding repayment of a $2,407.68 overpayment, one of which warned the debt could be handed to a collection agency, even though the company conceded she owed nothing. Her severance, meanwhile, didn't arrive until October 2017.
Tamburro called the company's handling of these issues negligent and said it would have caused the employee real stress, but he found nothing tying any of it to an intent to retaliate. He dismissed the remaining reprisal claims, along with the employer's separate bid to stay the case over delay, calling that request moot given the outcome.
