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ARTICLE · 09 OCTOBER 2025

Guilty By Association: Can Your Spouse Get You Fired?

Piccolo Heath
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Most employees try to maintain a separation of church and state between their home lives and their work lives. Highlighting the importance of that separation...

CanadaEmployment and HR
Jennifer Heath
Jennifer Heath
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Most employees try to maintain a separation of church and state between their home lives and their work lives. Highlighting the importance of that separation is a recent announcement of insider trading charges (also reported by various news outlets). This situation demonstrates how failing to maintain that separation can lead to guilt by association, resulting in an employee's termination.

The Recent Insider Trading Case in Texas

The insider trading charges stem from an employee's (the "Manager's") inadvertent breach of confidentiality. She was a mergers and acquisitions manager at a large oil and gas company (the "Employer"). She and her husband (the "Husband") worked from home, sitting approximately 6 metres away from one another. The Manager participated in several work discussion about the Employer's planned acquisition of a chain of truck stop centres (the "Target Co"). The Husband overheard these highly confidential conversations, and used the insider

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