The CBC didn’t fire Jian due to legal charges, in fact, they fired him before any of the allegations went public, and even promised to cover up the reasons to his termination.
Jian screwed himself by screening a violent sex tape to top CBC execs out of fear of a (dead) TorStar/Canadaland exposé. He did that under the self-delusion that this would be a sign of good-faith to the CBC and the CBC would then protect him from any of his previous actions (like they did when he sexually harassed his young female co-workers).
However after he got fired he went public with the reason and sued the CBC. The TorStar/Canadaland then published the story and many damning allegations. More women came forward and pressed legal action. Jian then withdrew from public life.
None of it goes to answer either of my questions however.
For the record: If he is acquitted I doubt that he will get his job back and I doubt his career will recover. I wish this were not the case but I expect that it will be.
The 2nd question is one with a factual answer but I don’t know what it is.
Being acquitted doesn’t mean the complainants have testified falsely. He could certainly sue them, but if he were to do that I believe the burden of proof would be pretty much reversed. Good luck with that.
No, it certainly doesn’t mean that they testified falsely. And I believe that the burden of proof would be reversed. And you’re right that it would likely be an uphill battle. Not to mention that doing so would mark him forever more as absolute scum.
Do you think he could successfully sue the CBC for wrongful termination?
His firing was for PR reasons based on the goal of getting ahead of a breaking scandal. There was no “scandal” per se and the facts have been argued before an impartial third party.
Given that, should he be acquitted, as far as the public record is concerned he did nothing criminal. Last I heard you could not be fired because your employer found your proclivities distasteful.
Now I don’t know the terms of his contract and there may be a “no cause” clause or a “morals” clause in which case there should and would be no expectation of reinstatement.
Lacking those and given that he voluntarily disclosed and behaved transparently, he did not - to the best of my knowledge - say anything disparaging about the CBC or his termination (the same can’t be said of them) and was acquitted, where would you see the just cause?
Zeke
P.S. IANAL and am therefore speaking from a position of curious lay-person possessed of just enough knowledge to be dangerous
Nope. He has no legal standing at all to do this. Ghomeshi’s employment was governed by a collective agreement. To get his job back he’d have to go through his union and grieve his case. He cannot preempt it by suing. His lawsuit was a PR move and had zero chance of being heard.
You most certainly can, if your job is intrinsically linked to the public perception of your employer. To rehire Ghomeshi would bring the CBC into public disrepute, no matter the verdict, and would damage their brand and ratings. It being his job to enhance brand and ratings, he would by definition be incompetent to perform his job.
Not just that, but his behaviour failing to rise to criminal sexual assault wouldn’t mean that he hadn’t beem in violation of any number of employee conduct/harassment policies. It’s been strongly suggested that he was actually well-known for harassing coworkers but had gotten away with it due to his star status, such as it was.
I suspect the absolute best case of Ghomeshi in a wrongful dismissal case would be that he manages to make the CBC look bad for not dumping him sooner.
Well, we don’t know all of the details, but my guess is he doesn’t have a hope in hell. Ontario has pretty firm rules about harassment and violence in the workplace, and it’s one of the easiest things to fire someone for. Perhaps more to the point, again, Ghomeshi was a public figure and it’s a sure bet his conditions of employment allowed the CBC to release him if he brought himself into public disgrace or embarrassment. If he was some schlub who did the books nobody had heard of it might be a different story.
Here’s a brief look at three reserves in northwestern Ontario by Global TV. It doesn’t get into the blame game, or how things came to be where they are today, or what needs to be done to change the way things are, but it does a good job at showing what we’re talking about when we talk about northern reserves in Ontario.
The vid is in three segments, each more disturbing than the previous.
The provincial government has promised that the bridge will fully re-open by the end of this month. Presently, it is one lane only, with interruptions for repair work.
They will start to stitch it back together early Sunday morning. They’ll do this by using weights to re-align the roadway with the abutment and then installing the primary bolts early Sunday morning, and then spend the rest of the day installing the other bolts (I’m crossing late Sunday afternoon and again on Monday evening, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they keep to schedule). Think of the bolts as buttons on a shirt – one fails, the rest fail. They have to replace them.
A few weeks ago, I was speaking with one of the government engineers involved in the testing, who said that the testing was not completed, but they suspected contractors and substandard bolts.
I still figure that it was a bad design, and was not tensioned properly. If it was tensioned too tightly, or if it was not securely anchored to account for the tension, then “SPROING.” My concern is that if the bridge cables were properly tensioned, and if the bolts were up to spec, then like a fat guy’s jacket buttons, we must expect repeated failure.
I’ve heard other engineers use the phrase “Architect’s dream, engineer’s nightmare.” It seems a common theme between the architect saying “Wow! What a concept! Looks great!” And then a long pause from the engineer, followed by “but will it work?”
They had bolted the bridge down to the abutment and removed the concrete weights by the time I went across on Sunday night. The government says that both lanes will be open to traffic by Thursday, but the tests on the busted bolts are not complete, so they still don’t know why the bridge failed. Until they figure it out and mitigate, for future trips I’ll be looking before I leap, just in case it fails again for the same mysterious reason.
The plan was to finish removing the original bridge this coming summer and start building the second span’s abutments, and then finish the second span in the summer of 2017. Both spans are to be identical in design and construction, two lanes each.
The deck of the original bridge was removed after one lane of the new span was opened, and removal of the old bridge’s girders had commenced, but demolition of the old bridge’s girders, piers and abutments was put on hold when the new span sproinged. I don’t know if they will continue to postpone demolition once the first new span is opened to both lanes.
I very much hope they do not do any more demolition for a couple of winters, and instead put a freeze on building the second span (the old bridge has to be entirely removed before the second span can be built). That way, if there is another failure due to it being a design problem rather than a manufacture/install problem, it will still be possible to erect a Bailey Bridge on what is left of the old bridge.
I am concerned that if the remains of the old bridge are removed and a second identical span is built, we could be left with two failed bridges and no alternate if indeed it was a design problem.
If I had my d’ruthers, we would fix the failed span, lay a Bailey Bridge on top of the remains of the old bridge, wait a couple of years before tearing down the remains of the old bridge to build a second span, and then build the second span using an entirely different design, with none of the designers, suppliers or builders of the first project being permitted to work on the second span. In short, when something does not work, do not rely on it any more than absolutely necessary, and do not repeat it.
