Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• The central question was whether the Tribunal administratif du travail (TAT) reasonably concluded that the Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux (MSSS), and not the CISSS de la Montérégie-Ouest, was the true employer of an employee on a two-year service loan.
• Under section 39 of the Quebec Labour Code, the TAT had declared that Ms. Julie Gatien was not included in the APTS bargaining unit as of September 18, 2023.
• Reasonableness was the standard of review applied to all three grounds raised, with the Court rejecting the CISSS's argument that the refusal to admit two exhibits attracted the correctness standard.
• Weighing of the Pointe-Claire criteria — hiring, task assignment, daily supervision, discipline, evaluation, and integration into the enterprise — was found to fall squarely within the TAT's expertise.
• Failure to expressly discuss the employee's subjective sense of belonging, the temporary nature of the loan, or the authorities pleaded (including the Abitibi-Témiscamingue decision) did not render the decision unreasonable.
• Excluding the local collective agreement provisions from evidence was a matter of managing proof, not a breach of procedural fairness, since bargaining-unit inclusion is a question of public order that a collective agreement cannot modify.

Facts of the case

Ms. Julie Gatien had worked as a human relations officer (agente de relations humaines) at the Centre intégré de santé et de services sociaux de la Montérégie-Ouest (CISSS) since 2018, supporting quality-control practitioners working with intermediate and family-type resources (RI-RTF). In 2022, she applied for a permanent advisor position at the Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux (MSSS) and was selected, but declined because the MSSS did not recognize all of her past experience, which negatively affected the proposed financial conditions. Toward the end of 2022, the MSSS offered her the same position through a two-year service loan between the CISSS and the MSSS, allowing her to keep her existing salary conditions. She accepted and, after an interview and discussions, began the new role — an advisory position in the negotiation of collective agreements with associations representing the RI-RTF, entirely different from her CISSS position — first part-time and then full-time as of September 18, 2023. From September 2023 she devoted all her time to the new role: her MSSS manager assigned her daily tasks, received her reports, and authorized her timesheets, while the CISSS approved those timesheets systematically and paid her salary. The MSSS approved her overtime, meal and travel expenses, and vacations, and controlled her attendance. She worked from home or at one of the MSSS's five service points and never attended CISSS premises, though she attended MSSS festivities as well as some social activities of her former CISSS team. On May 2, 2025, the Tribunal administratif du travail (TAT) granted the APTS's motion under section 39 of the Labour Code and declared that she was not included in the Alliance's bargaining unit since September 18, 2023, having concluded — applying the Supreme Court's criteria from Ville de Pointe-Claire — that the MSSS was her true employer. The CISSS sought judicial review of that decision before the Superior Court.

Contractual and statutory provisions at issue

The dispute turned on section 39 of the Labour Code, which governs determinations of whether a person is included in a bargaining unit, and on the terms of the service loan agreement between the CISSS and the MSSS. That agreement specifically provided that attendance control would follow the MSSS's methods and that the employee's performance could be evaluated by the MSSS in collaboration with the CISSS, although no evaluation had taken place by the time of the TAT hearing. Vacation approval rested with the MSSS according to its own ratios. The CISSS also sought to introduce two exhibits — the local collective provisions negotiated between it and the Alliance, and provisions concluded in other establishments concerning service loans — which the TAT refused to admit after hearing the parties on the objection.

The court's reasoning and analysis

Justice Maude Grenier held that the reasonableness standard applied to all three grounds of review, since questions about inclusion in a bargaining unit lie at the heart of the TAT's jurisdiction, and determining what constitutes relevant evidence likewise falls within the TAT's expertise, as confirmed by the Court of Appeal in HyCanada inc. On the first ground, the Court found that the CISSS was essentially asking it to substitute its own assessment of the evidence, which is not permitted on judicial review. Contrary to the CISSS's claims, the TAT had considered the systematic approval of timesheets by the CISSS, the employee's participation in some CISSS social activities, and the CISSS's continued responsibility for paying her salary; it simply found these elements insufficient when weighed against the other evidence. The transcript excerpts did not support the assertion that the CISSS remained responsible for administrative and disciplinary follow-up, and the employee's assumption that she would refer sick days to her CISSS manager remained hypothetical since the situation never arose. Regarding the employee's subjective sense of belonging and the temporary nature of the loan, the Court noted that the TAT had referred to these elements, that the implicit necessarily has its place in a judgment, and that even if omitting them were an error, it would not be of capital importance rendering the decision unreasonable. On the second ground, the Court recalled that the Abitibi-Témiscamingue decision was not a binding precedent, that prior decisions in service-loan contexts had gone both ways, and that a decision-maker need not address every argument or authority pleaded for its decision to be reasonable. On the third ground, the refusal to admit the two exhibits was a matter of administration of proof, not procedural fairness; the CISSS could not satisfactorily explain how their admission would have changed the outcome, and the determination of the true employer is a question of public order resting on the concrete facts of the work, which collective agreement provisions cannot modify.

Ruling and overall outcome

Concluding that the TAT had weighed all relevant factors in a flexible and global manner, that its reasoning was intelligible, justified, and transparent, and that its decision fell within the range of acceptable outcomes in light of the facts and the law, the Superior Court dismissed the CISSS's application for judicial review. The outcome favoured the Alliance du personnel professionnel et technique de la santé et des services sociaux (APTS), the mise en cause whose position — and the TAT decision in its favour — was upheld, with legal costs (frais de justice) ordered against the CISSS as the unsuccessful party. No specific monetary amount was stated in the judgment; the costs award was not quantified.