He wanted to 'escalate' the matter. The tribunal says that wasn't enough to count as a safety complaint
A worker who sent an email to HR saying he wanted to "escalate" concerns about a difficult co-worker, then lost his job less than two weeks later, has failed to convince a British Columbia tribunal that the firing was payback for raising a safety issue. The reason, in short: his email never said the word.
In a decision dated March 24, 2026, Vice Chair Larry Campbell of the Workers' Compensation Appeal Tribunal (WCAT) denied the worker's appeal and upheld a December 8, 2023, WorkSafeBC ruling that the employer had not engaged in prohibited action when it terminated him on July 6, 2022.
Words matter when raising a safety concern
Part of the worker's job was providing correction and feedback to a co-worker, identified in the decision as C. He told the tribunal that tensions built through late 2021 and into 2022, and that on June 1, 2022, C shouted at him in an open office. On June 23, 2022, he sent an email to his supervisor, copying the director of finance and the senior HR specialist, saying he wanted to "escalate" the matter.
Asked why he did not specifically advise the employer that the issue was one of bullying and harassment, the worker said he simply did not use those words. He said he did not feel he needed to use specific words such as bullying and harassment and that it should have been inferred from the email. He said he felt he was following the respectful workplace policies of the employer.
Campbell saw it differently. He found that the email "did not rise to the level of reporting a protected safety activity insofar as it did not identify bullying and harassment as a safety concern." A reasonable reading, he wrote, was that it described interpersonal issues between two co-workers, not a safety complaint.
A decision the employer says was already made
The employer's chief financial officer, identified as J, testified that she met with the director of finance, identified as A, in April 2022 and approved the recommendation to terminate the worker at that time. The senior HR specialist said that by mid-April 2022 he was aware the decision had been made.
The delay until July, the employer says, came down to workload. The team was in a busy period and the worker was needed to train another employee on a task no one else was knowledgeable enough to perform. J said she later spoke to A in early June and asked why the termination had not yet been communicated.
Campbell accepted the timeline. He found it "more likely than not that the decision to end the worker's employment had been made in April 2022, albeit that it was not conveyed to the worker until July 2022," and that the reasons given for the delay were consistent with evidence from both sides.
The narrow legal question: conflict or bullying?
The worker argued the employer's evidence should carry little weight given the absence of written performance records. Campbell acknowledged the concern but found the overall evidence supportive of the employer's position.
He was also clear about what a prohibited action case is, and is not, about. "The question in this case is not whether the worker was terminated for just cause, or no cause, or for performance or other reasons. It is not whether the processes were followed or not. The sole consideration is whether it related to his being involved in a protected safety activity."
Campbell added that "the existence of conflict in itself does not itself establish that there was bullying or harassment or any other safety-related concern."
