Ten days to file, and the case rested on a calendar nobody had pulled

The situation

The clock was the first thing we dealt with. Siran came to our office with nine days left on the one-year window most human rights applications need to be filed within, having spent the better part of a year trying to sort the dispute out directly with the practice before accepting that it was not going to resolve itself. Missing that window would not necessarily end the matter outright, but it would hand the other side an easy argument to have the case dismissed before it was ever heard on the merits, and we were not willing to gamble on that.

Siran worked as an independent contractor providing hygiene services at a dental practice in North Bay owned by Lusine, a dentist who had built the practice into a busy, well-regarded operation over a decade and a half. Siran had a chronic joint condition that, on bad weeks, made a full day of the repetitive hand positioning the work required painful and, on the worst weeks, close to impossible. A shortened schedule, an adjusted chair setup, and advance notice of which days were double-booked would have gone a long way toward making the work sustainable.

Siran had asked for those adjustments in a conversation with Lusine roughly eight months before the contract ended, and again in a follow-up email a few weeks later that received no direct reply. The requests were, in Siran's account, met with vague reassurance and no actual change to the schedule. When Siran's condition flared badly enough to require several unplanned absences, the practice ended the contract, citing reliability concerns and making no reference to the accommodation requests at all.

What Siran had going into the meeting with us was a strong sense of what had happened and comparatively thin paper to back it up: one email that had gone unanswered, a memory of a conversation with no witness, and a termination letter that studiously avoided the word disability. Marek, an investment advisor who handled the practice's books on a part-time basis, was known to Siran only as someone who was occasionally in the office, not as anyone connected to the dispute in any obvious way. Nobody yet understood how central his ordinary paperwork would turn out to be, or that the case would eventually turn less on what anyone remembered saying than on what a bookkeeper had jotted down for reasons that had nothing to do with any dispute.

What the other side was relying on

Lusine's position, once the practice retained its own lawyer and formal responses began, rested on three pillars. The first was that no accommodation request had ever been made in a form the practice could act on, since the one email Siran could point to was, in the practice's reading, an informal comment about a difficult week rather than a request for a schedule change. The second was that the termination had nothing to do with any health condition and everything to do with a documented pattern of late cancellations that had been building for months before any accommodation issue arose. The third was that, even if an accommodation request had been made, the practice had informally adjusted Siran's caseload on several occasions in ways that satisfied whatever obligation existed, even without a formal written accommodation plan.

That third argument was the one we took most seriously, because it did not depend on disputing that Siran had a real condition or a real difficulty; it conceded the difficulty and argued the practice had already responded to it adequately through informal, good-faith adjustments made on the fly. If a hearing accepted that account, Siran's case would fail almost entirely, because the legal question in an accommodation dispute is not whether an employer used the right words or followed a perfect process, but whether the person was, in substance, accommodated to the point of undue hardship for the employer. A messy but genuine effort can satisfy that standard even without formal documentation.

Lusine's lawyer also leaned on the absence of any written accommodation plan, framing Siran's account of a verbal conversation as unreliable and self-serving nine months after the fact, and pointed to the termination letter's businesslike, condition-neutral language as evidence that the decision had been made on ordinary performance grounds. Without something that could pin down, independently of either party's memory, what actually happened on the days in question, this risked becoming exactly the kind of one-account-against-another dispute that is genuinely difficult to win, because a hearing has no easy way to prefer one person's recollection over another's when both are testifying in good faith about events long past.

The practice's strongest asset, in other words, was ambiguity. Everything Siran remembered had happened in rooms with no one else present, and every document that existed could be read more than one way. Absent something more concrete, a hearing member weighing two sincere but conflicting accounts against each other has little to go on besides impressions formed on the day of testimony, which is not a comfortable place to start a case from.

What we did

1. Filed the human rights application within the deadline, working through the initial nine days to get the necessary facts, dates, and requested remedy into a properly drafted application before the filing window closed, which preserved Siran's right to be heard at all regardless of how the rest of the case developed and regardless of how the evidence later shaped up.
2. Requested full document disclosure from the practice, including scheduling software records, billing records, and internal messages, not because we already knew what we were looking for but because a dental practice's day-to-day operations generate a surprising amount of incidental record-keeping that nobody involved thinks of as evidence at the time. Casting the request broadly, rather than narrowly around the accommodation conversation itself, was what eventually put Marek's routine scheduling notes into our hands.
3. Reviewed the scheduling and billing records line by line against Siran's own recollection of specific bad weeks, cross-referencing appointment cancellations, chair assignments, and booking patterns to see whether the pattern of unreliability the practice described in its termination letter actually matched what the records showed. This methodical pass, rather than accepting either side's summary of events, was what surfaced the entries that ended up mattering most to the case.
4. Identified that Marek, the part-time bookkeeper and investment advisor, had recorded scheduling notes in the practice's financial software as a matter of ordinary routine, entirely unrelated to any dispute. Several of those notes referenced adjusted hours for Siran around dates that lined up with the accommodation conversation Siran remembered, which meant the practice's own paperwork, kept for bookkeeping reasons, corroborated a conversation nobody else had witnessed.
5. Took a formal statement from Marek, who had no stake in the outcome and no reason to shade his account either way, since his role was limited to the practice's books rather than its staffing decisions. His account, anchored to his own contemporaneous notes rather than memory alone, confirmed that scheduling changes had in fact been discussed and partly implemented around the time Siran said the accommodation request was made, giving the file its first independent corroboration.
6. Attempted mediation once disclosure was substantially complete, presenting the scheduling evidence directly to test whether the practice would revise its position now that Marek's notes were on the table. The practice held its ground, maintaining that its informal, ad hoc adjustments had already satisfied any obligation it owed Siran, and the matter proceeded to a full hearing rather than settling at that stage.
7. Prepared and led evidence at the hearing, including Marek's testimony and the underlying scheduling and billing records, structured to establish two distinct points: that a genuine accommodation request had been made, and that the practice's response to it had been inconsistent and, at points, effectively abandoned rather than sustained over time. Leading with the documentary evidence before Siran's own testimony gave the hearing member an anchor independent of either party's memory.
8. Made submissions on the standard the practice had to meet, arguing that occasional informal adjustments, made without any real plan or follow-through, fell short of the sustained effort the law requires once a genuine accommodation need has been identified and communicated, and that the burden to show undue hardship, if any was claimed, sat with the practice and had not been met.

The outcome

The hearing decision, issued several months after the hearing concluded, found that Siran had made a genuine accommodation request that the practice was obligated to respond to, and that Marek's scheduling notes, being contemporaneous and made by someone with no reason to favour either side, were more reliable than either party's recollection of the conversations themselves. On that finding, Siran won a central piece of the case that the practice's own lawyer had argued, in submissions before the hearing, would be nearly impossible to prove without a witness inside the room where the conversations happened.

The decision did not go entirely Siran's way. It found that the practice had made some genuine, if inconsistent, effort to adjust the schedule in the months before the termination, which meant the failure to accommodate was treated as partial rather than total, and it accepted that at least some of the cancellations cited in the termination letter were unrelated to the condition and did reflect a legitimate performance concern. Siran's application had sought just over a million dollars, calculated mainly on the income that would have followed from the multiple years remaining on the services contract, on the theory that a discriminatory termination had cut that income off. Once the decision stopped short of finding the termination itself discriminatory, treating it instead as a decision made for mixed reasons, most of that claim fell away, and the damages actually awarded, in the low six figures, reflected only the partial failure to accommodate the hearing did find.

Siran received compensation, a modest costs award covering part of the time spent on the application, and, just as importantly, a formal finding that the accommodation request had been real and had not been taken seriously enough. The practice avoided the larger finding it feared most, that the termination itself was retaliatory, and both sides came away with a result neither had fully wanted but could each explain to the people who mattered to them, without an appeal that would have added another year or more to a dispute that had already run long.

What you can learn from this