A federal employee asked to keep working from home. His employer offered a noise-cancelling headset instead. A labour tribunal says that answer badly missed the point of his disability. 

In a decision released June 19, 2026, adjudicator Christopher Rootham of the Federal Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board ruled that Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) failed to reasonably accommodate an engineer’s post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). 

Rootham ordered the department to let the employee keep working remotely, pay roughly two years of lost wages, and cover $28,000 in human rights damages for reckless conduct. 


Telework arrangement meets RTO mandate 

The employee, a computer engineer who develops software and cloud systems for a federal research unit in Ottawa, has PTSD marked by hypervigilance and a pervasive sense of being unsafe, according to his medical team’s evidence. He worked from home for nearly four years starting early in the pandemic, and was promoted twice in that time.  

When a 2022 government policy requiring public servants to return to offices two to three days a week took effect, he asked to keep working remotely as a disability accommodation. 

But the employer proposed three measures for use in the office: a noise-cancelling headset, a workstation away from the flow of other employees, and permission to come in on quieter days. It maintained those steps satisfied its duty to accommodate his condition and asked the tribunal to dismiss the grievance. 

Rootham disagreed. He allowed the grievance, finding that none of the three measures addressed how PTSD affected the employee’s ability to function in an office setting. 


Insufficient accommodations

The employee’s therapist and psychiatrist both testified that his hypervigilance came from a heightened, involuntary alertness to signs of danger, not from noise. Rootham noted that the employer never asked what was distracting the employee before assigning him a headset, writing that “not every problem of distractibility can be solved with a noise-cancelling headset.” 

The therapist testified that an isolated cubicle would not give the employee privacy to use his coping strategies unobserved, and that simply walking through an unpredictable office to reach his desk could itself set off his symptoms. The accommodation needed to preserve his access to a familiar, controlled environment and his support network of family and friends — something a workstation on a quiet day could not replicate. 

The employer never sought an independent medical assessment or a second opinion, and did not challenge the psychiatrist’s or therapist’s conclusions at the hearing. Rootham found the employer bore the burden of proving its plan was reasonable and had not met it, since the uncontradicted medical evidence showed none of the proposed measures would address the employee’s disability. 


Government ‘guilty of tunnel vision’ 

Internal correspondence describing telework as a measure of last resort drew criticism from Rootham, who pointed out that the government’s own return-to-office policy required managers to weigh individual circumstances, including the duty to accommodate, case by case. He found the employer’s “guilty of tunnel vision” in handling the request, including a stretch of at least six months when no one appeared to review a detailed letter from the employee’s therapist. 

The employer argued that the employee’s own preference for teleworking, including his earlier decision to move outside Ottawa, showed the request was more about convenience than disability.  

Rootham rejected that reasoning: “Making employees miserable is not the purpose of the duty to accommodate.” 

The employer must now let the employee resume remote work for at least two years, Rootham ordered, with the arrangement reviewable after that under the department’s accommodation policies then in effect. He also ordered back pay covering the roughly two years the employee spent on unpaid sick leave, plus $18,000 in damages for pain and suffering and a further $10,000 for what he found was reckless conduct in handling the accommodation request.