Four-day investigation into fire alarm dispute raises payroll issues
A correctional officer who spent four days representing his colleagues during a fire safety investigation nearly went unpaid for most of it, until a federal labour board sided against the employer.
In a decision released June 9, 2026, adjudicator David Olsen of the Federal Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board ruled in favour of the officer, a member of the joint health and safety committee at Kent Institution in Agassiz, B.C.
He ordered the Correctional Service of Canada to pay the overtime it withheld after a multi-day investigation in 2012.
Fire alarm dispute pulls in safety committee
The dispute traced all the way back to March 2012, when officers at Kent Institution refused to work over concerns that the facility's fire and smoke detection systems were not functioning as designed. Under the Canada Labour Code, a work refusal triggers a formal investigation, and the employee representative on the workplace health and safety committee has a mandatory role in it.
The officer was on a day off when a correctional manager called and asked him to come in on overtime hours. He agreed, and on his way to the institution, he reached two of the refusing employees by phone to learn what had prompted the complaint. He arrived at Kent Institution in the early afternoon, set up in the gym office, and began interviewing staff.
That evening, he joined a meeting with a federal health and safety officer that ran past 10 p.m. without a resolution. Over the following days, he kept fielding emails, tracked down records on a previous cell fire, and checked in with a senior manager overseeing the investigation who, he said, told him each night to return the next morning because the matter remained open.
Pre-approval of overtime hours
The employer paid the officer for six and three-quarter hours on the evening of the first day, when the federal officer was present, but denied his claims for the three days that followed. In a written response, the employer said overtime always had to be pre-approved by a manager and that none had been authorized beyond that first shift.
The employer's decision on the grievance also stated that three managers had confirmed the officer was never authorized to work the extra hours, and that he had been clearly advised more than once that he could go home to await the investigation's outcome. None of the employer's witnesses, however, could confirm at the hearing that he had actually been told to leave.
The officer testified that no one ever told him to leave and that he kept working because the investigation was still open. "If I was not needed, I had no business there," he said.
OHS rules for safety reps
Olsen reviewed the Canada Labour Code's occupational health and safety provisions, which he found place a mandatory obligation on workplace committee representatives to participate throughout an inquiry or investigation — not only when a federal health and safety officer is physically present.
A related Treasury Board directive states that time committee members spend on their duties counts as time worked for pay purposes.
Olsen found that a manager had, in effect, required the officer to work overtime for the length of the investigation, but that his claim was never formally certified afterward. He noted that one employer representative had taken the narrower view that pay was owed only for time spent directly with the federal officer, a position that aligned with pressure inside the institution to hold down costs before the fiscal year-end.
Olsen concluded that the employer had contravened the collective agreement by limiting the overtime it paid the officer. "The employer's position appears to me to be clearly unreasonable," he wrote, and ordered the Correctional Service of Canada to pay the outstanding overtime.
