The appellant, a non-unionized public employee holding office 'at pleasure', was dismissed without cause and given four months' pay in lieu of notice.
He grieved the dismissal, and an adjudicator ordered his reinstatement, finding a breach of procedural fairness and interpreting the governing legislation as requiring cause for dismissal.
The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the appeal, holding that the adjudicator's statutory interpretation was unreasonable and that public employees governed by a contract of employment are not owed a public law duty of procedural fairness upon dismissal.
In doing so, the Court fundamentally restructured the framework for judicial review of administrative decisions, collapsing the three previous standards of review into two: correctness and reasonableness.
