‘Progressive discipline may not be possible in all safety-related matters,’ says lawyer
When it comes to safety-sensitive workplaces, Canadian HR professionals are often at the crossroads of competing obligations: upholding discipline, respecting collective agreement sunset clauses, and ensuring public and employee safety. A British Columbia company successfully navigated that balance when an arbitrator recently dismissed a worker’s challenge of his firing for a safety infraction.
The worker was a truck driver for SYSCO Canada, a food service distributor based in Mississauga, Ont., at one of the company’s BC facilities. SYSCO terminated the worker’s employment in June 2025 for failing to stop at a stop sign in an industrial park the previous month — a violation that was captured by cameras in the truck he was driving. It wasn’t his first safety infraction — his record included a written warning in August 2023 for failing to stop at a traffic light and a two-day suspension with a final written warning in June 2024 for a similar offense and excessive speed.
When questioned about the incident, the worker initially said that he couldn’t recall the incident but believed he had stopped, saying that “I stop every time” and “I follow the rules.” He later acknowledged, upon being presented with video evidence from his vehicle, that he couldn’t deny running the stop sign. The worker expressed regret for his actions but couldn’t explain why he failed to stop.
Richard Johnson, a partner and co-founder at Ascent Employment Law in Vancouver, suggests that the employer’s patience in following a progressive discipline process helped them in the long run. “They went through that exercise in patience that unionized employers have to go through, and that is disciplining on more than one occasion, not just a one-and-done type situation,” he says. “I think that's what saved the day — the fact that they went through a few instances of discipline before they got to termination, and the fact that there was a safety-sensitive component to this that really overrode a lot of the other concerns the union raised.”
Johnson highlights the dual importance of progressive discipline and the heightened seriousness attached to safety-sensitive roles. SYSCO’s approach — documenting and escalating discipline — was instrumental in withstanding arbitral scrutiny, he says.
Progressive discipline in safety-sensitive context
The arbitrator emphasized the employer’s responsibility to maintain safety, noting that SYSCO’s trucks were “moving billboards” and any safety infractions were not only internal matters but also affected public perception and safety. Although SYSCO had engaged in progressive discipline to a certain extent, it isn’t always required where safety is at stake, according to Johnson.
“The arbitral authorities are clear that safety infractions are of the most serious nature and progressive discipline may not be possible in all safety-related matters — the serious nature of the infraction precluded further consideration, and I also consider deterrence to be an important factor here,” he says.
Johnson believes that recent cases indicated that employers will be quick to take discipline and safety-sensitive situations seriously, there’s an appreciation that employers can take a harsher approach to discipline when safety is involved.
“You'll get a bit more leeway as an employer if you're dealing with discipline when people's lives are in jeopardy or there can be potential harm,” he says.
Sunset clause didn’t cover all previous discipline
A central issue in the case was the application of the collective agreement’s sunset clause, which required the deletion of verbal or written warnings after one year and suspensions after 18 months. The arbitrator found that SYSCO had failed to delete the 2023 written warning for failing to stop at a traffic light, but the company ultimately didn’t rely on it, focusing on the more recent suspension and written warning along with the seriousness of the latest infraction.
“The arbitrator was able to sidestep the issue of the sunset clause because the employer had other discipline it could rely on,” says Johnson. “However, an employer who may leave discipline in that's expired under the sunset clause does so at its own peril — it could very easily have been a different decision if that was the only prior discipline and this most recent incident was the only thing that they were basing the termination on.”
SYSCO’s investigation relied on in-vehicle video evidence, which proved decisive. The arbitrator noted the worker’s initial denial followed by his admission when confronted with the video footage. Johnson believes the growing use of technology in monitoring employees can be a great help for investigations, but it should be used judiciously. “Where employers have folks doing safety-sensitive work or they have fleet vehicles where it would make sense to have GPS tracking or cameras, for example, I would encourage the use of those because it protects everybody,” he says. “However, when we're doing those types of things in the workplace, we always have to make sure that we're providing our employees with a heads-up — basically get their consent, even if it’s just telling them that you're doing it and by performing their work, they're implicitly consenting to data collection — it's a really critical point, to let your employees know in advance and then use it for the intended proper purpose.”
For HR, this means that implementing surveillance technology must be accompanied by robust privacy protocols, clear communication, and strict access controls.
Trust lost in the employment relationship
The arbitrator determined that the worker’s conduct — failing to stop at a stop sign at speed, shortly after a final warning for similar conduct — broke the trust essential to his role that had little supervision, with no evidence that it could be restored.
“Where an employer can establish that the relationship is broken and on multiple occasions there have been potentially serious safety infractions, it doesn’t need to show that it actually resulted in harm but that there's a logical flow that a safety breach could have injured members of the public or other employees,” says Johnson. “Always going back to that final part of the analysis on whether the relationship between the employer and the employee is so fractured that it can't be repaired — that's going to be the really dominant part of the test [for just cause].”
“It's incumbent on employers to also punctuate that when they go through their disciplinary documentation, termination documentation, and their defense at legal proceedings,” he adds.
The decision is a compelling precedent indicating that safety, patience, and principled discipline are not just best practices, they’re the foundation of defensible, effective strategy in safety-sensitive workplaces, according to Johnson.
“If it's a serious safety infraction you may be justified in terminating right off-the-bat, but in these unionized contexts it’s important to work through your progressive disciplinary policy,” he says. “Discipline quickly, but do it progressively where possible, be clear in your warnings to employees that there will be ramifications if it happens again, and then you don't need to have somebody injured or hurt for there to be discipline.”
