The firing was lawful. It was the parting words that cost him
The firing itself was not the problem. It was the insult that came with it. A single slur, delivered as a business owner was let go, was enough for Ontario's Human Rights Tribunal to find sex discrimination, even though she was never technically an employee.
In a decision dated June 2, 2026, Vice-Chair Lavinia Inbar of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario found a company president liable for discriminating against a self-employed contractor because of sex, and ordered him to pay $300 for injury to her dignity, feelings and self-respect. The broader claims of sexual harassment and reprisal were dismissed.
When the Code reaches past the payroll
The woman at the centre of the case did not work for the respondents in any conventional sense. She ran her own business services company and provided property management and consulting work to a group of companies under a series of written working agreements. The documentary record, Inbar noted, pointed to a relationship closer to that of an independent contractor than an employee.
That distinction did not put her outside the Code. Inbar held that human rights protection reaches well beyond traditional employer-employee arrangements, and that the right to contract without discrimination under section 3 of the Code can cover independent contractors. The relationship, she found, fell within the social area of employment, the social area of contracts, or both.
The companies she contracted with were never named as respondents. The two people named were individuals connected to the business, one of whom had signed the agreements as president and chief executive. Inbar found that person to be a directing mind of the companies. The second respondent did not appear at the hearing, and no findings were made against him.
Why the termination itself did not breach the Code
The contracts were ended by a lawyer's letter in July 2019. At a meeting days later, the business owner testified, she asked why she was being let go and was told she was a "dark cloud" and that the president hated her. Neither reason, Inbar found, had anything to do with sex.
Under cross-examination the applicant agreed she had no evidence that the president had directed the termination, and the decision to end the contracts had come through the companies' lawyer. Her replacement, the evidence showed, was a woman. Inbar was careful to separate an unfair firing from an unlawful one, noting that the applicant still had to prove "that the termination was discriminatory, not simply unfair."
The remaining complaints did not survive. Allegations of harassing emails and calls, of reprisal, and of a poisoned work environment were dismissed or set aside. Inbar found no evidence the applicant had claimed or tried to enforce a right under the Code, which is central to any reprisal claim, and ruled that the poisoned-environment allegations had not been properly raised.
The comment that changed the outcome
What remained was a single remark. The applicant's sworn evidence was that, as the termination letter was handed to her, the president called her a "fat bitch." He denied all the allegations against him but, Inbar found, offered no persuasive evidence to the contrary, and she accepted the applicant's account.
That comment, made in a workplace context, was enough. Inbar found it amounted to discrimination based on sex, writing that "'Bitch' is a derogatory term used to demean and disparage women." She stopped short of calling it sexual harassment, finding that one comment of this kind did not clear that higher bar.
Inbar ordered the president to pay $300 for injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect, placing the breach at the low end of the spectrum because it involved a single comment and no traditional employer-controlled relationship. The applicant, who said she had experienced anxiety and what she described as an undiagnosed eating disorder after the termination, provided no medical evidence, and Inbar declined to award more. Prejudgment interest of 2 percent and post-judgment interest of 2.5 percent were added.
