Dear boss, can I work remotely from Hawaii?

As a result of COVID-19, many Canadian provinces declared a public health emergency and either ordered (or urged) employers to let employees work from home if their tasks could be performed remotely. A business may face several crucially important issues with regard to performing work remotely. Can it establish an area or a distance within which employees are required to perform their duties remotely? Is it reasonable for an employer to prevent its staffers from performing their work outside of Canada when teleworking is presently mandatory in many of the country’s provinces? In a recent Quebec decision, an arbitrator had to decide on the strict and automatic application of a policy prohibiting an employee from performing his work duties from abroad.

Facts

An associate professor at a Quebec university asked his employer’s permission to stay in Honolulu, Hawaii, to perform his work duties remotely following a year’s sabbatical during which he had moved to the city with his family. Because of the COVID-19-related public health emergency in Canada and a previous medical issue affecting one of his children, the professor and his family wished to stay in Honolulu due to its low per capita coronavirus infection rate.

The employer refused the request. Therefore, the professor returned to Quebec without his family and performed all of his tasks from his residence without ever having to report to the workplace.