COURT OF APPEAL FOR ONTARIO
RE:
SANDRA FEDELE (Plaintiff/Respondent) –and– WINDSOR TEACHERS CREDIT UNION LIMITED (Defendant/Appellant)
BEFORE:
CATZMAN, FELDMAN and SHARPE JJ.A.
COUNSEL:
Arthur M. Barat, Q.C. and Avril A. Farlam, for the appellant
Samuel A. Mossman, for the respondent
HEARD:
July 17, 2001
RELEASED ORALLY:
July 17, 2001
On appeal from the judgment of Justice Joseph W. Quinn dated July 12, 2000.
E N D O R S E M E N T
1Mr. Barat argued that the trial judge ought to have rejected the respondent’s claim for wrongful dismissal. In his submissions, he emphasized the appellant’s statutory obligations and the respondent’s contractual obligations as warranting her dismissal as a matter of law. The difficulty with this argument is that there were specific findings by the trial judge that the termination of the respondent’s employment was dictated not by any breach of the appellant’s rules but by its desire to get rid of long-serving employees, including the respondent, and that the allegations against the respondent were not sincere but rather were motivated by that desire. It was open to the trial judge to make those findings on the evidence before him and, in our view, they are a complete answer to Mr. Barat’s submissions.
2With respect to the issue of damages for slander, there was evidence before the trial judge, in comments made in the appellant’s letter to the Ministry of March 24, 1998 and made at the 1999 annual meeting of its members, to support the trial judge’s conclusion that the appellant had defamed the respondent. Mr. Barat submitted that, if slander were proved, the words were communicated on occasions of qualified privilege. In our view, the remarks of the trial judge in the closing paragraph of his reasons for judgment are the clear equivalent of a finding of malice, which vitiates any qualified privilege that would otherwise attach.
3The respondent cross-appealed, seeking first, an increase in the damages awarded for slander; second, an award of punitive and aggravated damages; and third, damages for intentional infliction of mental distress. In our view, the damages which the trial judge saw fit to award for slander and his award to the respondent of her costs of the action on a solicitor and his own client scale reflected his denunciation of the appellant’s conduct, and were not out of the acceptable range so as to warrant the intervention of this court by awarding the further damages sought on the cross-appeal.
4For these reasons, the appeal and the cross-appeal are dismissed. The respondent is entitled to her costs of the appeal, and the appellant to its costs of the cross-appeal, both on a party-and-party scale, forthwith after their assessment.
Signed: “M.A. Catzman J.A.”
“K. Feldman J.A.”
“Robert J. Sharpe J.A.”