Mere weeks from the municipal election, the sudden news of Rob
Ford's cancer diagnosis brings to mind how devastating illness
can be to one's career.
One never expects to leave work for an indefinite period,
suddenly off-loading work fraught with looming deadlines to
colleagues; leaving your employer and coworkers in the lurch.
A sick leave, taken at an inopportune time, can be catastrophic,
steering your employer's business off the rails. When this
happens, to what extent must employers suffer this inconvenience
and keep an employee's job available until he or she is well
enough to return?
The short answer, employers must accommodate sick employees to
the point of "undue hardship", which is generally
accepted to mean that employers have to show that their business
would suffer overwhelming harm or loss as a result of not
terminating the sick employee. What many employers don't
appreciate is that this is an onerous burden as the legal threshold
to prove undue
