Law360 Canada ( December 27, 2017, 8:17 AM EST) -- Appeal by Baker from a ruling of the Workers’ Compensation Appeals Tribunal (Tribunal) regarding the Tribunal’s test for pre-hearing disclosure to the employer of the documents possessed by the Workers' Compensation Board (Board). The Tribunal determined that all documents possessed by the Board should be disclosed to the employer, regardless of relevance. At the time of the decision, the Tribunal’s Practice Manual provided that the employer should receive only the documents that were relevant to the issues. The Tribunal declined to follow its Manual on the basis that “relevance” was an unworkable standard that broke down in practice. In its decision, the Tribunal stated that the vetting process was time consuming and required too many administrative resources. The Tribunal noted there was no definition of relevance in the Workers’ Compensation Act (Act), Board Policy, or in the Tribunal’s Practice Manual to guide the vetting process. Consequently, it found there was potential for error, inconsistency and arbitrariness in the disclosure determinations. The Tribunal held the view that vetting before disclosure was inherently unfair to the employer and that disclosure based on relevance of the document infringed principles of procedural fairness. Despite the Tribunal’s acknowledgement that documents in the Board’s file for a worker might include highly confidential material which was irrelevant to the proceeding, the Tribunal ruled that everything in the Board’s file for a worker must be disclosed to the employer....