When is a Resignation Not a Resignation: How to Resign from a Job?

How to Resign from a Job?

Resignation from a job can take many forms. A prose-laden letter reflecting on your career, a curt and professional note indicating the effective date of resignation, or even slamming your badge and gun on your boss’ desk and saying “I’m going to need to go outside the system for this one, Sarge” (Followed, hopefully, by your arrest shortly thereafter).

The Two-Part Test for an Effective Resignation

Courts recognize this variability, and have adopted a two-part rule for finding an effective resignation:

• The resignation must be clear, unequivocal, and given voluntarily. There is no one rule for such a statement – it can be written or verbal – but a heat of the moment outburst is much less likely to be considered valid than a clearly worded email.
• The resignation must be accepted by the employer. If the employer has not accepted the resignation, the employee may rescind their resignation.

When Employers Try to Take Advantage of Unclear Resignations

This can lead to many situations where the employer is unclear if their employee has just resigned, as well as other situations where the employer is all to happy to take advantage of a momentary outburst to avoid paying severance to a disgruntled employee. The recent Saskatchewan case of Denton v Parriwi Management Inc., 2024 SKKB 216, contained a bit of both.

The Plaintiff was a long service employee who was called into a meeting on July 15, 2020 with several other people. During the meeting, a verbal altercation broke out, and the Plaintiff said “I’m done” before walking out of the office.

Parrriwi’s executives immediately found the Plaintiff in his office, and asked him to reconsider, and to “not throw his career away”. Following this, the Plaintiff went on a short-term disability leave, and during this period Parrawi, by their own evidence, considered him to still be employed.

However, the company seemed unhappy with the Plaintiff’s absence, as evidenced by the amount of times it asked him when he was ready to come back to work and questioning the basis of his disability, as well as sabotaging his application for long-term disability benefits.

This culminated in a fairly ill-advised letter from Parriwi on November 24, 2020, in which it advised that it had accepted his resignation from July 15, 2020.

Fortunately for the Plaintiff, merely saying something doesn’t make it true. The court found that the Plaintiff had most certainly not resigned, and that even if he had, the employer had clearly made an effort to get him to rescind his resignation, which he did. This was not a particularly close case, and the employer was lucky just to come away without being hit with punitive damages for essentially playing a game of make believe resignation just to avoid paying out severance to a disabled employee.

How can Whitten and Lublin?

As this case demonstrates, resignations can be tricky business, and there is a lot of room for both confusion and underhanded tactics. If you are an employee looking for guidance on a potential resignation, or looking to protect yourself from being found to have resigned, Whitten and Lublin is here to help. Contact us online or by phone at (416) 640-2667.

Author – Aaron Zaltzman