Company fails to pay proper overtime wages and statutory holiday pay, and withheld gratuities
A cafe's fight against a wage order fell apart once new evidence was presented to the British Columbia Employment Standards Tribunal.
The ruling, dated Aug. 20, 2026, comes from tribunal member Diane Irvine, who dismissed the appeal by SP Cafe Corp., the company behind Wicked Cafe and Bakery.
She also upheld an order to pay a former employee $5,078 in total, including $3,078 in unpaid wages plus interest and $2,000 in administrative penalties.
The saga began when the former employee, who worked as front-of-house staff and a baker, filed a complaint under the Employment Standards Act. She said she'd been paid her regular rate for overtime instead of the higher rate, and separately claimed she'd put in another 120 hours, covering staff meetings, admin work, messages and baking schedules, without pay.
A delegate for the Director of Employment Standards found insufficient evidence for the 120-hour story, so those hours went unpaid. But the delegate did confirm the company had failed to pay proper overtime wages and statutory holiday pay, and had withheld gratuities the employee was owed.
On Oct. 3, 2025, the company was ordered to pay $3,078 in unpaid wages plus interest, plus $2,000 in administrative penalties.
SP Cafe Corp. appealed, arguing the process hadn't been fair. Its sole director said his ability to gather evidence and hire a lawyer was hampered by a federal exclusion order barring him from Canada since November 2022, and that he hadn't received the Determination until Nov. 3, 2025. The Tribunal agreed the appeal was on time, but noted timeliness alone doesn't decide a case's merits.
New evidence fails legal test
Further down the line, the company changed tack, arguing new evidence had surfaced and that the delegate had gotten the law wrong. That evidence included statements from its general manager and kitchen manager, which the company called sworn affidavits.
Irvine wasn't convinced: nothing suggested the statements were made under oath, and no notary's seal or stamp appeared on them, so she didn't treat them as legally sworn evidence.
Alongside those statements came other paperwork, including a job offer letter written to a different employee, the former employee's resume and resignation letter, and old time logs, plus photos that had nothing to do with work, including pictures from social events and of a new tattoo.
New evidence on appeal must clear a four-part test, and the first part sank this bid: it must be something that couldn't have been dug up earlier with due diligence. Nearly two years passed between the 2023 complaint and the 2025 Determination, giving the company plenty of time, and its general manager had already talked to the investigator months earlier.
As Irvine put it, an appeal is "not meant to be an opportunity to 'try again' with a new decision-maker."
Appeal dismissed
SP Cafe Corp. also claimed a supervisor, said to have a personal relationship with the employee, had helped manipulate her evidence, offering nothing but disagreement with the delegate's findings.
Under the Employment Standards Act, the tribunal can only step in for genuine legal mistakes, not disagreements about the facts. Irvine said weighing evidence and judging credibility was squarely the delegate's job, and the company hadn't shown her conclusions were pulled out of thin air.
With none of its arguments holding up, Irvine dismissed the appeal and confirmed the Determination, ordering payment of $5,078 plus accrued interest.
