Three Motions in One Morning Against a Dundas Veterinary Technician

The situation

The notice came by email on a Thursday afternoon, listing three separate motions the clinic's lawyer intended to bring, all scheduled for the same return date three weeks out. Vartan recognized the tactic immediately because it was familiar. He had been our client once before, roughly a year earlier, when he first raised concerns about a new agreement the clinic wanted him to sign.

Vartan had worked as a veterinary technician at a small animal clinic in Dundas for several years, paid hourly, scheduled by the clinic, using the clinic's equipment and following its procedures. The previous year, the clinic's owner, Marek, had asked Vartan and several other staff to sign a new agreement reclassifying them as independent contractors, framed as a way to give them more flexible hours. At the time, we reviewed the agreement for Vartan and advised him plainly not to sign it, since the actual working relationship described in the document did not match how independent contracting normally works, and signing it could later be used against him if his employment ever ended.

Vartan understood the advice and signed anyway. He was worried about losing hours if he pushed back, and the clinic had made clear the new terms were not really optional for staff who wanted to stay on. It is a common position for an employee to be in, and not one we would have criticized him for even at the time.

That decision became relevant again when the clinic let Vartan go without formal notice or severance, following a dispute over scheduling changes that reduced his hours sharply. Vartan brought a claim for wrongful dismissal, arguing that regardless of what the paperwork called him, he had always functioned as an employee. Hagop, who did groundskeeping and maintenance work at the same clinic and had been in the room when staff were told the new agreements were not optional, was prepared to support that account.

The clinic's response was the three-motion notice. Rather than simply defending the claim, Marek's lawyer moved to have the case struck or transferred on the basis that Vartan was a contractor bound by the agreement, sought security for costs on the theory the claim was weak, and moved to compel production of financial records before any of the substantive issues had been decided. All three were set down for the same date, a scheduling choice designed to resolve the case in a single expensive court appearance for Vartan's side.

The legal question

Underneath the procedural bundle sat one real question: was Vartan an employee, a genuine independent contractor, or something in between, and did the agreement he signed settle that question on its own. Ontario law recognizes that a signed label does not automatically decide the nature of a working relationship. Courts look past the title in the contract to the substance of how the work actually operated, including who controlled the schedule, who supplied the tools and workspace, whether the worker could profit from efficiency or bore any real risk of loss, and how integrated the person was into the business.

On nearly every one of those factors, Vartan's actual working conditions looked like employment. He worked hours the clinic set, used the clinic's equipment and facility, followed clinic procedures for patient care, and had no ability to increase his earnings through business decisions of his own the way a genuine contractor running an independent operation would. The written agreement called him a contractor, but the label and the reality pulled in different directions, and the law generally favours the reality.

There is also a middle category, sometimes called dependent contractor status, for workers who are not fully integrated employees but who are economically dependent on one client for most or all of their income and lack real independence in how they work. This category exists because the employee-or-contractor divide does not fit every real working relationship, and workers who fall into it are still entitled to reasonable notice on termination, even though other protections that apply strictly to employees may not.

The clinic's position was that the signed agreement should be treated as conclusive, and that a court should not need to look behind it to the day-to-day reality of the job. If that view had prevailed, Vartan's claim would likely have been pushed into a different, less favourable process entirely, with a shorter path to dismissal and a real risk of an adverse costs order given the security for costs motion sitting alongside it. Resolving this question first, before anything else in the case moved forward, was the entire point of how the clinic had structured its three motions.

There was an added layer to the question in Vartan's case specifically, because he had been advised against signing the agreement and signed it anyway under real workplace pressure. That fact did not, on its own, undo the agreement, since employees sign documents under some degree of pressure all the time and courts are cautious about treating every reluctant signature as invalid. But it was relevant evidence of how the agreement came about, and it fit into the broader picture of whether Vartan had ever actually operated with the independence a genuine contractor relationship requires, or whether the paperwork had simply been layered on top of a relationship that continued to function exactly as it always had.

What we did

1. Identified which motion actually mattered first. Of the three motions bundled onto the same date, the classification motion was the only one capable of ending the case outright. We treated it as the priority and organized our preparation time around it, rather than splitting effort evenly across all three, since a win or loss there would largely determine whether the other two motions mattered at all.
2. Requested the motions be argued in sequence rather than together. We asked the court to hear the classification issue first and adjourn the security for costs and production motions to follow only if needed, arguing it made no sense to fight about costs security or document production before knowing whether the case belonged in this court at all. The court agreed, which meant Vartan's side only had to be fully prepared on one issue at the first appearance, not three at once.
3. Built the employment-status evidence around actual working conditions. Rather than relying on the contract's label, we gathered scheduling records, equipment lists, and clinic procedure documents showing Vartan had no independence in how or when he worked, directly supporting the argument that substance should control over the agreement's wording. This evidence gave the court something concrete to weigh against the signed paperwork, rather than asking it to accept Vartan's account on his word alone.
4. Secured Hagop's evidence on how the agreements were presented. We took a detailed statement from Hagop describing the staff meeting where the new agreements were introduced as effectively mandatory, which helped explain why Vartan signed despite having been advised not to and undercut any argument that the agreement reflected a freely negotiated contractor relationship. An independent witness to that meeting mattered because it turned Vartan's account of workplace pressure into something the clinic could not simply deny.
5. Opposed the classification motion on the merits. We argued that the working relationship, examined on its real facts, was either a full employment relationship or, at minimum, dependent contractor status entitling Vartan to reasonable notice, and that the signed label should not be treated as ending the inquiry given the pressure under which it was signed. This kept the case in front of a judge weighing substance over form, rather than deciding it on the contract's wording alone.
6. Used the classification result to reframe the remaining motions. Once the court found there was a genuine issue as to Vartan's status requiring a full hearing rather than summary dismissal, the security for costs and production motions lost most of their force, since they had been built on the premise that Vartan's claim was clearly weak. With that premise gone, the clinic had little practical reason to keep pressing either motion further.
7. Opened settlement discussions from a stronger position. With the classification question no longer resolved in the clinic's favour and the other two motions effectively stalled, we approached the clinic about resolving the claim directly rather than proceeding through a longer trial process, given the cost and delay a full hearing would add for both sides, and given that Marek's counsel had, by this point, lost the procedural advantage the original bundled motions were designed to create.

The outcome

The classification motion did not go entirely Vartan's way. The court declined to find he was a full employee outright, giving the signed agreement some evidentiary weight even though it did not settle the question on its own, but found the relationship most closely resembled dependent contractor status, which still carried an entitlement to reasonable notice on termination. That outcome fell short of the stronger position a clear employee finding would have given him, and it meant the notice period ultimately negotiated was shorter than what full employee status would typically support.

With the security for costs and production motions no longer pressing, the parties negotiated a settlement in the $50,000 to $65,000 range, reflecting a notice period consistent with dependent contractor status rather than a longer employee-standard notice period. Vartan gave up the chance to pursue a full employee finding through trial, a real concession given how much work had gone into that argument, in exchange for a faster resolution and the certainty of payment.

The signed agreement from the year before did leave a mark on the outcome, and Vartan said afterward that he understood now why the original advice against signing it had mattered, even though the immediate pressure at the time had made it feel like the safer choice. The case closed with a real result, but not the full result a clean employee finding might have produced, a reminder that decisions made under workplace pressure can still shape a dispute long after the original moment has passed.

Hagop's evidence, while never tested at a full trial, played a real role in how the negotiations unfolded. Once Marek's lawyer understood there was a witness prepared to describe the meeting where the contractor agreements were presented as effectively mandatory, the clinic's appetite for pushing the classification issue further through a costly trial dropped noticeably. Marek also agreed, as part of the settlement, to provide Vartan with a neutral reference for future employment, something that had not been on the table before the classification ruling narrowed his options.

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