Arsenault Aaron Legal Services

Since the advent of personal information protection legislation in the 2000’s we have mastered and championed individual rights of privacy, dignity and freedom from interference in various contexts such as invasive laboratory testing, unjustified attempts to obtain financial information, protection of biometric information, workplace surveillance and locker searches and GPS monitoring.

Grounded in man’s physical and moral autonomy, privacy is essential for the well-being of the individual. For this reason alone, it is worthy of constitutional protection, but it also has profound significance for the public order. The restraints imposed on government to pry into the lives of the citizen go to the essence of a democratic state.

R. v. Dyment, [1988] 2 S.C.R. 417, at pages 427 and 428, per La Forest J.

In the information age, those restrains must apply also to the corporate Goliath, both with respect to the manner in which it collects personal information, as well as its obligation to secure our personal information from unauthorized access, use and disclosure.

The Class Proceedings Act is a critically important tool for facilitating access to justice on behalf of group of plaintiffs where it would not be economically feasible for any one of them to bring the action on their own. Our team combines class action experience with a commitment to empowering the public to address critically important social issues including environmental contamination, civil liberties and information privacy.

Our relationships with our trade union clients have been nurtured over decades of committed advocacy in the protection of workplace rights, collective agreement arbitration, industrial warfare, pension plan litigation, internal union relations, privacy, occupational health & safety and the Charter right to a meaningful process of collective bargaining. Our specialized practice in this area brings a leading level of expertise to litigation before the Labour Relations Board, the Federal Court of Canada, the British Columbia Supreme Court, the Human Rights Tribunal and the Office of the Information Privacy Commissioner.

We bring decades of experience to the practice of holding government decision-makers accountable to fair process and the limitations of their statutory powers. The evolving law of judicial review has resulted in a complex practice of administrative law that we specialize in. Our successes have resulted in the protection against unlawful access to information, compelling the issuance of security permits and the judicial scrutiny of statutory decision-makers.

In the non-unionized context, an employee is owed reasonable notice of termination (or compensation in lieu thereof), unless the employer can establish just cause for termination or the employee has waived his/her common law notice rights by way of a contract of employment. We prosecute wrongful dismissal actions with a commitment to providing workers with a financial bridge so as to enable them a reasonable time to secure comparable re-employment.

Retirement savings benefits are increasingly the source of dispute as demographics realize a high population of retirees with the propensity to live longer and stronger. Having successfully defended multiple clients from attacks on the integrity of their pension funds, we are proven advocates for the secure future of hard working beneficiaries.

Well before the legalization of marijuana, our firm has been a leader in implementing industry-wide solutions to the tension between personal privacy and public safety in the context of drug policy. Complex issues of testing and privacy have been at the forefront of our work, in addition to regulatory and human rights litigation.