Can a shareholder bring an oppression claim if they were fired as an employee of the family business?

Potentially, yes, but it depends heavily on the specific facts and, in particular, on whether the shareholder's role as an employee was closely tied to the reasonable expectations they had as a shareholder — this comes up often in family businesses, where a shareholder's job and their ownership stake are practically intertwined even though they are legally separate things. Courts have recognized that in a small, closely-held corporation, especially a family business where a shareholder took a lower salary or reinvested profits on the understanding that their role and involvement were secure, terminating that person's employment can, in the right circumstances, be part of a broader pattern of oppressive conduct if it was done to unfairly squeeze them out of the benefits of their investment.

A straightforward employment dismissal on its own, without more, is not automatically oppression. The analysis usually looks at the full context: whether the termination was paired with being cut off from information, dividends, or decision-making, whether there was a reasonable expectation of continued involvement based on the company's history, and whether the majority's conduct as a whole unfairly disregarded the minority shareholder's interests. Because employment and shareholder issues get tangled together in these disputes, they often need to be assessed together.