Doctors say Alberta Health Services failed to pay overtime, denied rest breaks
Alberta Health Services is facing a class-action lawsuit from foreign-trained doctors who say the health authority failed to pay them for overtime, denied them rest breaks, and left them working unpaid after their shifts ended.
Justice C.D. Simard of the Court of King's Bench of Alberta certified the case as a class proceeding on June 11, 2026, allowing it to move ahead on behalf of potentially hundreds of current and former clinical assistants. The lead plaintiff, Mena Salamh, trained as a cardiologist in Egypt before emigrating to Canada in 2013.
Alberta Health Services hires clinical assistants who were trained as physicians in other countries but not licensed to practise medicine in Alberta. The health authority now refers to these employees, and a related group once called clinical surgical assistants, as associate physicians.
Salamh is suing as a representative plaintiff for all non-management, non-unionized employees who have worked for the authority as clinical assistants since August 12, 2013. He claims the employer breached its obligations to that group and acted knowingly and in bad faith, allegations
Alberta Health Services has not yet answered with a statement of defence.
Claims of unpaid overtime
At the centre of the lawsuit are claims that the authority failed to pay clinical assistants properly for overtime, did not give them required rest periods, did not pay them for the patient handover work they did at the end of their shifts, and required them to work overly long shifts, all contrary to Alberta's Employment Standards Code. None of these claims has been proven.
Alberta Health Services argued, among other things, that the unpaid work claims belonged under the province's workers' compensation regime, which would bar a civil suit.
Justice Simard rejected that view, writing that "To suggest that an employer not paying an employee for providing services required in their employment contract constitutes a workplace 'accident' stretches the normal meaning of that word to an extreme and unreasonable extent."
The claim also originally raised discrimination tied to where the clinical assistants were educated and to their ancestry, but Salamh conceded during argument that he was not pursuing discrimination as a separate cause of action.
The judge declined to strike those allegations, finding they could still be relevant to other claims, including a request for punitive damages.
Class action certified
Because the application dealt only with certification, Justice Simard did not rule on whether any of the allegations are true. The judge certified most of the common questions the plaintiff put forward, declining only three, and allowed just one damages question, the class's entitlement to punitive damages, to be decided collectively.
Treating the dispute as a single class action, the judge found, would serve judicial economy and access to justice. There are hundreds of clinical assistants, and forcing each to sue individually would consume court resources and leave workers facing heavy financial burdens.
The judge also pointed to the workers' position. In Alberta, the authority is one of very few employers through which internationally trained doctors can use their medical training without requalifying to practise, which the judge found heightened their exposure to reprisal.
"Their allegations, if proven to be true, demonstrate that they are a group with substantial vulnerability to their employer," Justice Simard wrote. The parties now have 45 days to try to agree on how the case will proceed.
