A federal labour board has agreed to hear the case of a Parks Canada employee denied a religious exemption from the COVID-19 vaccine, after the government argued she had missed deadlines for filing a grievance through the union.
Jennifer Squires, who worked as a senior financial services adviser, applied to the Federal Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board for a time extension on a grievance against her employer, Parks Canada, who placed her on administrative leave without pay for not complying with a policy on mandatory COVID vaccination.
The Public Service Alliance of Canada, the union representing Squires, took the matter to the labour board after Parks Canada summarily dismissed the employee’s request without a hearing.
Parks Canada objected to Squires’s application on the grounds that the federal board had no jurisdiction to hear the matter, and that the grievance missed timelines under the union collective agreement. The government agency also argued that Squires’s being placed on unpaid leave was an administrative, not disciplinary, decision.
On Nov. 8, 2021, Parks Canada employees were told they had to provide proof of COVID vaccination, unless they applied for accommodation based on medical, religious, or other human rights grounds. Squires requested a religious exemption on Jan. 28, 2022, according to the labour board decision, which was denied.
Squires, with the assistance of her union, filed a grievance and Parks Canada denied it, saying it was “untimely.” The adjudicator rejected that argument, noting that Squires diligently tried to communicate with her employer and promptly filed a grievance with the help of her union.
“The injustice to the applicant, should her grievances not be heard, is significant. The remedies she seeks relate to a grave injustice against her,” said Perrault.
The labour board found that there was a compelling reason for the delay, the delay was short, and that Squires’s grievance should be placed on the hearing schedule “in due course.”
Squires is just one of many Canadian employees that were suspended or even fired for not complying with a wave of mandatory COVID policies that blanketed the country in 2021 and 2022.
In a Treasury Board Inquiry of Ministry in 2022, the government said that 2,042 employees applied for a religious exemption.
They were required to submit a notarized affidavit, but of those who followed the process, only 26 percent, roughly 540, were approved. The government said managers were not solely making the decisions.
“They were supported by experienced human resources professionals who receive policy guidance,” said the inquiry.
While an internal Oct. 6, 2021, Treasury Board memo advised that religious exemptions should be granted to employees, regardless of their church, mosque, temple, or synagogue’s specific tenets, according to Blacklock’s Reporter, the overwhelming majority of requests for exemptions were denied.
The memo, “Managers’ Toolkit for the Implementation of the Policy on COVID-19 Vaccination for the Core Public Administration Including the RCMP,” said managers “must be satisfied the employee holds a sincere religious belief that prevents them from being fully vaccinated.”
A 2004 precedent-setting Supreme Court ruling on religious freedom said: “The state is in no position to be, nor should it become, the arbiter of religious dogma. Sincerity of belief simply implies an honesty of belief and the Court’s role is to ensure a presently asserted belief is in good faith, neither fictitious nor capricious,” said the ruling. Whether an individual’s convictions were consistent was irrelevant, the decision said.
