Timing, condonation, and cause

Alleging cause for a dismissal is not the same as establishing it. In Ontario, the difference is decided by a court, on the facts, and the timing of the reason can matter as much as its substance.

By Christiana Sagay, Chressa Law · Published June 29, 2026 · Read time 5 minutes

When an employment relationship ends, a reason usually accompanies the ending. Sometimes that reason is framed as cause. The word carries weight, because a dismissal for cause can remove an employee’s entitlement to notice or pay in lieu of it. What is easy to miss is that the reason an employer states is the beginning of the analysis, not the end of it. Ontario law asks a further question. Does the reason, measured against the facts, actually meet the threshold the law sets.

That threshold is high, and it is deliberately so. The Supreme Court of Canada set the modern approach in McKinley v. BC Tel, where the Court held that whether misconduct justifies dismissal is a contextual question. A finding that an employee did something wrong does not, on its own, establish cause. The question is whether the conduct, seen in its full circumstances, was serious enough that the employment relationship could no longer continue. The Court framed this around proportionality, a measured fit between the conduct and the response.

Condonation and the timing of dismissal

One of the quieter features of this area is that the same conduct can carry a different legal weight depending on what the employer did, and when. Two doctrines illustrate the point.

The first is condonation. Where an employer knows of a practice or a course of conduct and accepts it over time, its ability to later treat that same conduct as cause can be affected. The principle is reflected in Ontario’s own termination regulation, which preserves an employer’s ability to dismiss for wilful misconduct only where the conduct has not been condoned by the employer. An employer that wishes to preserve its position generally has to signal, clearly, that a practice is not accepted and that its continuation may lead to consequences.

The second is the question of timing, and what is sometimes called after-acquired cause. An employer is generally entitled to rely on misconduct it discovers after a dismissal, provided the conduct occurred before the termination. But where the facts were known at the time and not acted on, a later attempt to raise them as cause is treated differently. Courts examine these claims with care, mindful that a reason raised late can sometimes be an attempt to justify, after the fact, a decision already made. The Ontario Superior Court worked through this in Ratz-Cheung v. BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc., applying the contextual test from McKinley and the framework the Court of Appeal set out in Dowling v. Ontario (WSIB).

Why the sequence matters

Put together, these principles describe something very useful. They describe a sequence. What was the conduct? What did the employer know, and when? What did the employer do once it knew? Did anything change between the conduct and the dismissal? The sequence is part of what a court examines.

This is why a stated reason and a legally sufficient reason are not always the same thing. The gap here is beyond technicality, as such a careful early conversation, for either an employee or an employer, earns its place.

None of this is legal advice, and none of it speaks to any particular dismissal. The principles are general, and how they apply depends entirely on the facts of a given situation. The value in setting them out is narrower. Whether you are an employee weighing a reason you have been given, or an employer considering how to frame one, the law looks past the label to the facts beneath it. Knowing that the analysis works this way is the first step toward understanding where any individual situation actually stands.