Kate Hughes

She provides legal services to professionals including representation at labour arbitration, the Ontario and Canada labour board and other tribunals, court judicial reviews and appeals, injunctions, advice regarding strikes and lockouts, professional regulation and discipline matters at regulatory colleges, inquests, advice regarding hospital privileges, civil litigation, pay equity and human rights matters.

Kate is a past President of the Canadian Association of Labour lawyers/Association canadienne des avocats du mouvement syndical, the association representing labour lawyers across Canada. She was a co-chair of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal Practice Advisory Committee until the Committee was suspended indefinitely by the present Ontario government. She has frequently represented the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund at the Supreme Court of Canada and Ontario Court of Appeal.

Kate was the recipient of the Award of Excellence In the Promotion of Women’s Equality in 2014. She was voted by her peers in the legal community as a “Best Lawyer” by L’Expert in 2019, as she was for every year for over the last decade.

Kate has repeatedly represented her clients at all levels of appeals, including repeatedly at the Supreme Court of Canada in December 2019 on an equality case for part-time workers (Ontario (Attorney General) v. Fraser, 2011 SCC 20 (CanLII), [2011] 2 SCR 3). She was counsel in the ground-breaking discrimination case known as Meiorin or the “female firefighter case” where the SCC accepted her argument and used it to establish the new test for discrimination (British Columbia v. British Columbia Government and Service Employees’ Union (BCGSEU) (Meiorin) [1999] 3 S.C.R. 3). Other notable appeal cases are Talos (Talos v. Grand Erie District School Board, 2018 HRTO 680 (CanLII)), the OHRT lead case dealing with benefits after age 65; Johnstone (Canada (Attorney General) v. Johnstone, 2014 FCA 110 (CanLII)), the leading case on the human rights ground of family status; BMWE v. Canadian Pacific case (Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Canadian Pacific System Federation v. Canadian Pacific Ltd., 1996 CanLII 215 (SCC), [1996] 2 SCR 495), where she established the right of a union to obtain a court injunction against an employer for violating the collective agreement where there was no effective means to obtain interim remedies from an arbitrator.

Kate is especially well known for her work in human rights. In addition to being counsel on the leading cases of Meirion, Talos and Johnstone she was counsel on the leading case dealing with systemic human rights remedies (McKinnon v. the Ministry of Corrections), which has been upheld by the Court of Appeal (McKinnon v. Ontario (Correctional Services), 2007 HRTO 4 (CanLII)). She was lead counsel in a well known sexual harassment case against the Toronto Police Services Board (McWilliam v. Toronto Police Services Board, 2020 HRTO 574 (CanLII).

In the labour field, Kate is well known for a large number of successful lead cases on behalf of unions, including in the area of privacy including around medical forms, human rights issues around addictions, overturning unreasonable policies such as the “vaccinate or mask” policies in Ontario hospitals, accommodation issues, arbitrations regarding pension and deemed offsets, challenges to the use of agency workers, as well as hundreds of contract interpretation, discharge and discipline arbitrations and acting for unions in injunctions in strike and picketing cases.

She has worked on several Public Inquiries, including representing Northern Irish families at the Blood Sunday Inquiry in Derry in the North of Ireland in September 2011. Most recently she represented ONA at the Long-Term Care Inquiry in 2018-19 (chaired by The Honourable Justice Gillese).

Kate is a frequent speaker on a variety of labour issues including discrimination in the workplace, harassment, duty of accommodation and professional discipline, health and education matters.

In addition to being called to the Ontario Bar in 1987, Kate is also called to the bar in British Columbia where she practiced labour law from 1993-98 before returning to Cavalluzzo. Prior to initially joining Cavalluzzo in 1988, Kate worked with the all-women labour law firm, Symes Kiteley & McIntyre in Toronto from 1985 to 1987.