So if you'll confess to a spot of laziness, I'll confess to seizing an excuse to procrastinate on writing today.

I love the question.  And I think the court's statement is indeed inconsistent with legal expectations.  The problem, seems to me, with wrongful discharge as frame, is that on its terms, the tort is set up only to contemplate pl. employee vs. def. employer, because the discharge is the operative conduct.

I looked through instead a load of cases on abandonment.  I figured there would be some there of employer vs. employee.  There were, but precious few, and they tended to be old.  Like dawn-of-the-Industrial-Revolution old.

The closest I came to fitting your bill--it doesn't--was Hammer v. Breidenbach, 31 Mo. 49 (1860).  A brewery proprietor sued his brewmaster for abandonment, but didn't win.  The two had contracted and agreed on a $500 penalty (not liquidated damages) if "good beer" didn't come from the relationship, which it didn't, so that was the damages claim.  But the employee won on grounds the proprietor had not furnished adequate equipment. 

As you might imagine, abandonment cases are virtually universally about employers defending with abandonment, not claiming for abandonment.  The employer seems lucky to get away without paying severance.

Your B.C. court has one thing going for it, I figure, which is that employers might bring different claims, such as tortious interference, breach of fiduciary duty, or conversion of trade secret or other business property.  The wrongful discharge parallel would have to be breach of an implied contract; maybe fiduciary duty comes closest. 

But I have trouble imagining the scenario where public policy provides the underpinning of the implied contract, the way it does in wrongful discharge.  Say, an employer suing for damages resulting from abandonment, when the employee left out of race-discriminatory motivation?  That seems a total non-starter.  The Washington State Supreme Court wrote, en banc, that "in the absence of a contract stating otherwise, an employee has the absolute right to abandon his or her employment at-will."  Ford v. Trendwest Resorts, Inc., 146 Wash. 2d 146, 152, 43 P.3d 1223, 1226 (2002).  The rule is a converse-corollary to the employer's right to terminate at will.  But the public policy exception doesn't seem to have a converse reflection.  So the B.C. court seems to have said too much.

Thanks for the distraction.  Now back to the grind....


Richard J. Peltz-Steele