EMPLOYMENT | What to do with Your Conscience at Work?.

• Date: 01 March 2020
• Author: Bowal, Peter

We hear a lot today about people following their conscience. Conscience is more than mere preferences and choices. It is about one's values, spiritual worldview and visceral sense of right and wrong. Few employees want to compromise on their deepest conscientious beliefs for their jobs. These beliefs often arise from religious convictions but are technically independent of religion. How is one's conscience protected at work?

Constitutional Freedom but Not a Regulatory Human Right

To follow one's conscience is a fundamental freedom on par with equality and free speech in the Charter of Rights. That means that government employers at all levels throughout Canada must accommodate their employees' consciences.

However, most people do not work for a government entity. They work in the private sector which is governed by provincial and territorial law. The human rights legislation at this level does not require employers to preserve employees' freedoms of conscience. The only human right at this private sector level of employment is essentially equality and freedom from discrimination on enumerated grounds (such as race, gender, disability, age, etc.) unless there is a bona fide occupational requirement to discriminate on any of those grounds.

Even in the private sector, one also finds some inherent protection for conscience. If, for example, a worker is asked to do something illegal or unreasonably dangerous, the worker may refuse and will be protected by both regulation and the common law. No employer, when challenged in a legal proceeding, will get away with disciplining workers in such scenarios.

Conscientious Refusal to Perform Legal Acts

The...