Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Centre de services scolaire des Samares applied for judicial review of an arbitration award rendered on 2 July 2024 finding that it had violated clause 5-15.02 of the local collective agreement.
• At issue was whether the employer was contractually obliged to grant partial unpaid leave requests when a qualified replacement could be found under the terms of the collective agreement.
• Central to the dispute was the Employer's directive of 25 August 2022, which effectively prevented the fulfilment of the suspensive condition in clause 5-15.02 by blocking all unpaid leave replacements not filled from the priority list.
• The arbitrator applied Civil Code provisions on suspensive conditions but failed to analyze whether the employer's discretion was exercised in good faith and without fault — a decisive gap in the legal reasoning.
• Labour shortage was a key factual issue: following the 2022 assignment session, 122 full-time positions and 128 part-time teaching positions remained unfilled.
• Obligations under the Loi sur l'instruction publique requiring the employer to ensure qualified teachers were engaged were raised but not meaningfully addressed in the arbitral decision.

Facts of the case

Centre de services scolaire des Samares (the Employer) applied for judicial review before the Superior Court of Quebec, District of Joliette, seeking to quash an arbitration award rendered on 2 July 2024 by arbitrator Me Jean Ménard. The award had upheld a grievance filed by the Syndicat de l'enseignement du Lanaudière (the Union) alleging that the Employer violated clause 5-15.02 of the local collective agreement. The case was heard by the Honourable Justice Pierre Labelle on 14 April 2026, with judgment rendered on 14 May 2026.

The dispute arose from a directive issued by the Employer on 25 August 2022 to the principals of its primary and secondary schools, stating that all replacements for unpaid leave positions not filled from the priority list would remain unfilled, and that only maternity leaves and pre-retirement leaves would be authorized. The directive remained in effect until 2 November 2022. At the time, the Employer was facing an increased demand for teachers due to significant population growth in the region, compounding a province-wide teacher shortage. Following the assignment session for the 2022–2023 school year, 122 full-time positions — representing 69% of full-time posts — were left unfilled. A further 128 part-time positions also remained vacant. The arbitration hearing spanned 12 days between 14 March 2023 and 29 May 2024, during which more than one hundred exhibits were filed and multiple witnesses testified, including seven female teachers and one male teacher who had requested unpaid leave.

Contractual clause at issue

The central provision was the first paragraph of clause 5-15.02 of the local agreement, which states that the school board grants an unpaid leave of one year, full-time or part-time, to a teacher who requests it — entitling the replacement teacher to a part-time contract — on the condition that the school board finds a substitute meeting the capacity criteria as defined in clause 5-3.13 of the national agreement. Those capacity criteria require the substitute to hold a teaching certificate and possess the relevant experience or specialization. The grievance alleged that the Employer had refused unpaid leave requests by invoking a teacher shortage, a ground not recognized as a valid basis for refusal under the local agreement, and had added a requirement of legal qualification under the Loi sur l'instruction publique not found in the clause itself.

Court's reasoning and analysis

The parties agreed, and the Court concurred, that the applicable standard of review was reasonableness. The Court examined whether the arbitral decision was intrinsically coherent, rationally justified, and defensible in light of the applicable legal and factual constraints.

On the first question — whether the Employer was obliged to grant the unpaid leave requests — the arbitrator had interpreted the verb "grants" in clause 5-15.02 as creating a mandatory obligation once all conditions were met, and had applied articles 1500 and 1503 of the Civil Code of Québec to conclude that the Employer's directive constituted an impediment to fulfilment of the suspensive condition, thereby triggering the obligation. The Court found this reasoning facially reasonable but identified a critical omission: the arbitrator had not analyzed the nature of the condition as a simply potestative one — that is, a condition depending both on the debtor's will and on external circumstances. Such a condition is valid but requires that the debtor act in good faith and without fault. Under established case law, a condition cannot be deemed fulfilled when its non-fulfilment does not constitute a fault on the debtor's part. The arbitrator's failure to examine whether the Employer had acted in good faith or committed a fault represented a decisive flaw in the legal reasoning.

On the second question — whether the labour shortage justified the Employer's departure from its contractual obligations — the Court found the arbitrator's analysis unreasonable on two grounds. First, the arbitrator had improperly shifted the burden of proof onto the Employer by requiring it to demonstrate that its directive had contributed to meeting its staffing needs, when that burden properly belonged to the Union. Second, the arbitrator had overlooked the 128 unfilled part-time positions still outstanding as of 8 September 2022, focusing solely on the two remaining full-time vacancies on that date and drawing an unwarranted inference about the Employer's continued need.

On the third question — whether the Employer's obligations under the Loi sur l'instruction publique (LIP) could justify non-compliance — the Court found the arbitrator's treatment incoherent and legally flawed. Article 261 of the LIP imposes a public-order obligation on the Employer to ensure that persons engaged to provide educational services hold a valid teaching authorization issued by the Minister. The arbitrator had deflected this obligation by weighing the benefits to students of having a rested, mentally healthy teacher against the statutory duty to provide a qualified one — an analysis the Court held to be irrelevant and incapable of grounding a valid interpretation of the clause. Because the LIP provisions are matters of public order, the arbitrator's failure to address this central question left a crucial gap rendering the decision indefensible.

Ruling and overall outcome

The Superior Court granted the Employer's application for judicial review. The arbitral award of 2 July 2024 was quashed and set aside in its entirety, and the matter was remitted for re-hearing before a different arbitrator, as the original arbitrator had already determined the outcome of the grievance. Costs were awarded in favour of the Employer, though no specific amount was stated. No monetary damages had been determined at the arbitral level, and none was ordered by the Court; the exact monetary impact of the dispute, if any, remains to be determined in the new arbitration.