Emily Home is an adept litigator with proven skills helping labour-side clients resolve complex disputes.
Emily represents unions, associations and their members in all matters related to labour law, human rights and civil litigation, including constitutional litigation. As a litigator, she represents clients in the Superior Court, Divisional Court and Court of Appeal. She also appears frequently in private labour arbitrations and before a range of tribunals and boards including the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, Ontario Labour Relations Board, Grievance Settlement Board and Landlord and Tenant Board. Her strengths come to the fore particularly in cases requiring the untangling of complicated factual issues.
Since joining the firm in 2020, Emily has helped represent transit unions, education unions, police associations and skilled trades, often in cases of significance not only to clients themselves but to the labour movement and the public more generally. Her record includes helping defend the access of her association client and the wider public to the human rights tribunal system, the right of unions to lobby governments on behalf of their members and the Charter rights of over 750,000 Ontario education workers subjected to unfair wage restraint legislation.
Emily is a member the Advocates Society and a past Member-at-Large of the society’s Labour & Employment Practice Group. She is also a member of the Canadian Association of Labour Lawyers and the Law Union of Ontario. She has spoken at the Police Association of Ontario annual employment law conference.
Emily studied law at Osgoode Hall Law School, graduating in the top 10% of her class and having been awarded several prizes for top marks, including in civil procedure. While at Osgoode, she served as an associate editor of the Osgoode Hall Law Journal and worked at Parkdale Community Legal Services in the Housing Rights division.
She holds an MA in Canadian Politics from Queen’s University and a BA in Canadian Studies from Trent University.
Decisions of Interest
- A case before the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) in which the tribunal determined that it has concurrent jurisdiction over human rights matters related to collective agreements and that unionized employees should therefore have direct access to the tribunal.
- A Charter challenge successfully overturning provincial wage restraint legislation infringing on the rights of public sector unions to meaningful collective bargaining.
- A Charter challenge, advanced by a coalition of education sector unions, that successfully overturned legislated restrictions on third-party political advertising but that the Government of Ontario then overrode – notoriously invoking the notwithstanding clause of the Charter for the first time.
- An arbitration decision in which a transit union client persuaded a 20-year list arbitrator to reject an employer’s motion that he recuse himself for bias on the basis of a tangential personal connection.