Law360 Canada ( November 5, 2017, 2:10 PM EST) -- Appeal by the Association of Justice Counsel (AJC) from a Federal Court of Appeal judgment allowing the government’s application for judicial review and setting aside a grievance adjudicator’s decision. The AJC filed a grievance on behalf of lawyers working in the Immigration Law Directorate in the Quebec Regional Office of the Department of Justice Canada. The grievance was filed after the employer, Department of Justice, issued a directive making after-hour standby shifts mandatory for lawyers working in the Directorate. Prior to the issuance of the directive, government immigration lawyers covered standby shifts on a voluntary basis. They were compensated with paid leave and received the same amount of compensation irrespective of whether they were called into work. In March 2010, the employer informed the lawyers that they would no longer be paid for time spent on standby. Instead, they would be compensated only for the time they spent working if they received an urgent request. The directive envisioned that the lawyers would be compensated for time worked through either overtime pay or paid leave, depending on their seniority status. With this change in policy, there were no longer enough volunteers to cover the standby periods. In response, management made the standby duty shifts mandatory. All qualified lawyers in the office were required to cover the evening and weekend shifts one to three weeks per year. The AJC grieved the mandatory standby directive. The labour adjudicator agreed with the AJC that the directive was not a reasonable or fair exercise of management rights and violated the constitutional rights of the lawyers. He concluded that the standby requirement implicated the liberty rights guaranteed to the lawyers under s. 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Charter), and that the infringement did not conform to the principles of fundamental justice. Consequentially, he concluded that the directive also breached clause 6.01 of the collective agreement, which prohibited the government from imposing a workplace policy that would restrict the lawyers’ constitutional rights, or other rights granted to them through federal legislation. The employer was ordered to immediately cease applying the directive. The Federal Court of Appeal set aside the adjudicator’s decision and directed another adjudicator to find that the directive represented a fair and reasonable exercise of management rights. The Court reasoned the adjudicator had placed an unreasonable burden on the employer to justify the need for the standby directive and had ignored evidence that showed there were not enough volunteers after the lawyers were informed that they would no longer be compensated for being on standby. The Court also determined that the adjudicator erred in his analysis of s. 7 of the Charter and clause 6.01 of the collective agreement. The Court reasoned the adjudicator had unreasonably extended the right to liberty beyond that established through prior jurisprudence....