IMPERIAL OIL DRUG TESTING POLICY RUNS AGROUND

The Ontario Court of Appeal has issued its long anticipated decision on the legality of Imperial Oil's drug testing policy. In the result, after nearly a decade of struggle, Imperial Oil employee Marty Entrop, CCLA, and the Ontario Human Rights Commission have won a qualified victory in the fight against universal pre-employment and random safety-sensitive urinalysis drug testing. While the Court declared that such testing violates the human rights of employees, technical grounds prevented the Court from ordering Imperial to kill its policy immediately. However, while the policy is still potentially afloat, it is effectively dead in the water. Imperial Oil has announced that it has suspended the policy indefinitely.

CCLA has consistently argued that Imperial's policy amounted to a gratuitous invasion of the privacy and dignity of employees. The Court agreed, noting that "... drug testing suffers from one fundamental flaw. It cannot measure present impairment." Accordingly, the Court chastised Imperial's approach, calling it "... arbitrary ... for the reason that a positive drug test does not demonstrate incapability to perform the work safely." On the subject of pre-employment drug testing the Court was equally clear: "... a positive test does not show future impairment or even likely future impairment on the job, yet an applicant who tests positive only once is not hired." While CCLA will continue to monitor Imperial's actions, the civil liberties group has praised the courage of Entrop and the advocacy skills of CCLA Special Counsel Paul Cavalluzzo and Jeff Andrew.