Recent decisions in Ontario and British Columbia demonstrate the balance between employers’ need to know and employees’ right to privacy at the heart of the employee accommodation process.

“Arbitrators look to confine requests for medical documentation to what is reasonably necessary to determine the legal elements of accommodation,” says Michelle Cook, a labour and employment lawyer at Aird & Berlis LLP.

Those elements include whether the employee has a qualifying protected disability, whether the employee has made the need for accommodation known and whether the employer has sufficiently considered appropriate forms of accommodation to the point of undue hardship.

Read: How are pandemic reverberations affecting disability management programs, workplace accommodations?

What’s clear is that medical notes containing bare assertions are insufficient to establish disability. Recently, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal ruled that medical notes indicating that an employee was “totally disabled” for a........

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