Hedrick v Toews: Workplace Stalking, Frustration of Contract, and Employer Duties

A BC Supreme Court decision released this week, Hedrick v Toews, 2026 BCSC 1250, is more than a frustration of contract case. It's a prime example of how systemic ignorance and the deprioritization of gender-based violence can play out in the workplace. It's also a warning to employers: if your own inaction contributes to a worker's inability to return to work, you'll have a wrongful dismissal case on your hands.

Here's what happened, what the court got right, and where I think the reasons fall short.

The facts

The plaintiff was a commission-earning insurance producer at a BC brokerage. A representative from a major client account stalked her for several years. He waited for her in the work parking lot. He followed her on the highway. The stalking eventually escalated to him appearing at the home she shared with her young child.

She told her manager early on. In August 2021, she sent him a detailed email describing how the situation had escalated and asking for guidance. He promised to come up with a plan. He never did.

She developed severe PTSD and major depressive disorder, and experienced suicidal ideation. WorkSafeBC ultimately determined her she had no prospect of returning to work with the employer as a result of these injuries.

The employer terminated her employment, relying on frustration of contract.

What the court decided

The court rejected the frustration defence. Frustration requires a supervening event that is not the fault of either party. Here, the court found the employer, by its inaction, contributed to the employee's injuries and her inability to work. Moreover, the court found the manager breached his duty under BC's Workers Compensation Act to protect the plaintiff's health and safety (para 79). On this basis, the wrongful dismissal claim succeeded.

The court awarded nine months' pay in lieu of notice, based on the standard Bardal factors.

Two other holdings are worth noting. First, the court refused to deduct the WorkSafeBC benefits she received after her condition stabilized. It drew a line between benefits that replace lost wages (deductible) and benefits that compensate for the injury itself (not deductible). If you practice where workers' compensation meets wrongful dismissal, read the decision for this analysis alone. Second, the court declined to reduce damages for failure to mitigate, accepting that she was not medically fit to search for work.

But the court declined to award aggravated or punitive damages. It described the employer's conduct as, at worst, "insensitive, unprofessional, or improper."

Some may call the outcome a success for the plaintiff as she won her wrongful dismissal suit. But she also lost her career, suffered permanent harm, and the knock-on effects no doubt profoundly impacted her child.

Which leads to my concerns.

1. The employer's duty to protect the employee

The employer wasn't absolved of its obligation to investigate the stalking and come up with a safety plan just because the employee worried that terminating the client relationship would cause financial hardship. And yet this explanation appears a few times in the decision.

There's a gendered element here. The tension between financial survival and safety is a structural burden that women and survivors of gender-based violence disproportionately bear. This employee was asked, implicitly, to choose between her income and her safety. No one should have to make that choice alone, and her employer had both the authority and the legal duty to take that weight off her shoulders.

Notice what the facts show instead. The firm kept the client. It renewed the contracts while she was on medical leave. Her manager took over her commissions from the account. Her safety was treated as her problem to manage, while the revenue was treated as the firm's priority.

2. Retaliation in everything but name

The court didn't make a retaliation finding. But consider what the sequence of events suggests.

After she asked for help, her request to work remotely was dismissed without reason and without consideration, along with a threat to take away her assistant. The employer tried to push her onto leave rather than let her choose vacation, or, though it wasn't expressly addressed, a health and safety work refusal. Her pay was cut without notice or justification. When she raised the stalking again, the response was anger. Her subsequent bullying complaint to HR was all but ignored.

The court noted that this treatment worsened her mental health.

3. The downgrading of the seriousness of stalking

Neither the employer nor the court seemed to fully appreciate the gravity of the harm this employee endured. Stalking is a highly gendered form of violence. Perpetrators are overwhelmingly men. Victims are overwhelmingly women. It has devastating psychological consequences, as this case shows, and it can escalate to homicide.

The employer's inaction was far more serious than "insensitive." Her life was in danger.

Was "insensitive" the right word? The punitive/aggravated damages question

Here's where the three concerns above become a legal question.

Aggravated damages in wrongful dismissal don't require malice but rather flow from bad faith in the manner of dismissal: conduct that is "untruthful, misleading or unduly insensitive," causing mental distress.

This employer contributed to a worker's psychiatric injury, then terminated her by letter, without a single conversation, while she had documented PTSD. Viewed through a lens that understands gender-based violence, these facts paint a picture of seriously unfair treatment in the manner of dismissal. That claim deserved its own analysis, on its own test.

As for punitive damages, a more informed understanding of the risk the employer exposed the employee to, plus a proper weighting of the harm she experienced, including the harm from the apparent reprisal, might also have grounded an independent wrong supporting punitive damages.

A familiar pattern: the Serious Enough parallel

The way this decision handles stalking reminds me of a recent article by Bethany Hastie and Sofia Cornejo, "Serious Enough? Troubling Civil Courts' Assessments of the Seriousness of Sexual Harassment in Wrongful Dismissal Cases," published in the Canadian Journal of Human Rights.

Hedrick is not a sexual harassment case. But notice the parallel. Hastie and Cornejo document how courts downgrade "non-physical" sexual harassment relative to physical harassment. Here, a court similarly failed to realize the potentially lethal risk associated with stalking. The pattern is the same: gender-based harms get minimized when the decision-maker doesn't have the training to see their full weight.

So what should have happened?

When a worker tells you they're being stalked, that is a workplace safety issue with legal duties attached. It is not an awkward personal matter.

In this case, that disclosure should have triggered:

1. A risk assessment, done promptly and documented.

2. A safety plan covering the workplace, arrival and departure, and communication protocols.

3. A real conversation about what the employee needed, including remote work as a safety measure rather than a privilege to be revoked.

4. And a considered, employer-led decision about the client relationship that didn't leave the employee carrying the financial weight of her own safety.

To learn more about stalking, including how to recognize it and support someone experiencing it, visit stalking.ca.

A note if this story lands close to home: if you or someone you know is experiencing stalking or thoughts of suicide, support is available. In Canada, you can call or text 988 any time.

Where Clausework comes in

I help employers get ahead of exactly this kind of failure. That work includes workplace domestic violence and other gender-based harm response programs, risk assessment and safety planning frameworks, training for managers and HR teams, and readiness audits that find the gaps before a crisis does.

If this case raised questions about your own workplace, book a strategic advisory session. One hour, practical answers, and a clear picture of where you stand.

And if you want to stay on top of related case law updates, follow me on LinkedIn. Canadian tribunals are now deciding whether survivors of intimate partner violence are protected by human rights law. The first merits decision landed in the Yukon this May, and it went the survivor's way. Federal and BC decisions are expected next.