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Statutory Interpretation - "Required". Royal Ottawa Health Care Group v. OPSEU
In Royal Ottawa Health Care Group v. OPSEU (Ont Divisional Ct, 2025) the Divisional Court dismissed a employer's JR, here from a labour "arbitrator’s decision [that] upheld grievances filed by the respondent union on behalf of two bargaining unit members who were switchboard operators at the hospital".
The court considered the meaning of the term 'required', here in the context of the larger labour term 'required to work', from the collective agreement:[17] I disagree that there is only one meaning of the words “required to work” in the context of this collective agreement as applied by these parties. In addition to considering how the provision was applied through the rest of the hospital, the arbitrator looked to other articles of the collective agreement. These included articles that defined full-time employees as those who were “regularly scheduled to work full-time hours.” Considering full-time employees, the subject of the disputed clause, were regularly scheduled to work full-time hours, the arbitrator concluded that “required to work” referred to a full-time employee who was regularly scheduled to work and chose to do so.
[18] The interpretation adopted by the arbitrator may not have been the only one available to her. But I disagree with the hospital that “required to work” has a single meaning. Indeed, in Ottawa Hospital v. Ontario Nurses’ Association, 2018 CanLII 34647 (Ont. Arb. Bd.), which the hospital relies on, the arbitrator’s discussion reveals a possible range of meanings. At p. 13 of that case, Arbitrator Slotnick reproduced a passage from Re Durham (Reg. Municipality) and ONA (Ninacs-Gomes), 2009 CarswellOnt 10486 (Arb. Bd.), stating “The word ‘required’ is a word which has two related but different meanings. It takes its meaning from the context in which it is used. ‘Required’ can mean needed, necessary, or essential, as in a prerequisite. It can also mean obligatory, compulsory or mandatory.”
[19] In Ottawa Hospital, the hospital had asked a nurse to work a day shift in return for giving up a later scheduled night shift. The collective agreement called for payment of time-and-a-half where the nurse was “required to work” on a scheduled day off. The arbitrator rejected the hospital’s argument that the nurse was not “required to work,” since she had made the choice to do so. Instead, “required to work,” understood in context, meant that changes initiated by the hospital, even if voluntarily accepted by the nurse, attracted a premium, while changes initiated by a nurse did not.
[20] Teamsters Local Union No. 647 v. Logistics in Motion (2023), 350 L.A.C. (4th) 75 (Ont. Arb. Bd.) similarly emphasized the range of meanings attributable to “required” work. The question there was whether the employer was entitled to impose mandatory on-call work. While the arbitrator concluded that the collective agreement allowed the employer to do so, he disagreed that the word “required,” in the context of the relevant provision, made the on-call work mandatory. He emphasized that “the word ‘required’ allows for different meanings in different contexts, and the list of possibly synonyms…is far from exhaustive”: at para. 26.
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