I’m sure everyone has seen the flow chart, no by the end of Oct and you get severance. Yes…if you don’t make the get, you get severed and get the same severance. Get offered a position and decline, you get severed and get the same severance. So it appears there is no down side to saying yes to the relocation and the rejecting the position offer if you really don’t want to relocate. It doesn’t make sense….so here’s my thesis.
Summary - to prevent lawsuits, individual and class action, for forced work place move.
If you say yes to relocation, they will have data that you were fine with relocation (in a class action they’d have all the names because the survey isn’t anonymous). Then when you’re offered a position and you turn it down, you’re doing so for the position not the relocation reasoning, that’s how it would be documented in the official files. But we know the real reason people are going to say yes is to buy time…
This is all about changing the terms of your employment contract. Yes your contract has some verbiage about the company operated across Canada and can relocated you for business purposes. This is too vague and what the company is doing is constructive dismissal which has legal severance limit of 24 months of pay.
It’s easy to get a full description of this and how it works as well as cases with ruling in AB and Canada. Get Google Gemini, put it in deep research mode, prompt it to provide the employee rights when it comes to forced office relocation, and about 15 minutes later there is a very extensive report with cited examples that states it all.
This was the most interesting part in the report out I received.
VI. Corporate Risk Mitigation and Strategic Recommendations
6.1. Best Practices in Drafting and Implementation of Relocation Policies
To minimize exposure to constructive dismissal claims, employers must ensure employment documentation clearly addresses the geographic parameters of the role.
Clarity in Mobility Clauses: All employment contracts, particularly for new hires, must include an unambiguous, expressly written mobility clause. This clause must detail the specific geographic scope within which the employer retains the right to transfer the employee (e.g., "within the current city limits," "within a 30 km radius of the headquarters," or "any company site in North America"). Vague references to "transfers" are insufficient.
Retention of Recall Rights (Post-Pandemic Arrangements): For any existing remote or hybrid arrangement formalized during or after the pandemic, the employer must issue explicit, written addenda clarifying that the arrangement is temporary, revocable, and that the company explicitly retains the unilateral right to mandate a return to the physical office. This documentation is necessary to prevent the remote work arrangement from becoming an "integral term" of the contract through custom and practice, as occurred in the Nickles and Byrd decisions.
6.2. Strategic Use of Notice Periods for Contractual Change
When a necessary relocation is not explicitly permitted by contract, imposing the change unilaterally creates immediate liability. To execute a required change while mitigating CD risk, the employer must offer the employee the change with a period of advance notice equivalent to the common law reasonable notice (severance) the employee would receive upon termination.
If the employee accepts the relocation after the notice period expires, the new terms are formalized. If the employee rejects the relocation change at the end of the notice period, they are deemed terminated, but the employer has fulfilled its notice obligations by providing the time period required by common law. This strategy converts a high-risk unilateral breach into a controlled, noticed termination event.