Tribunal sides with BC Emergency Health Services over paramedic’s bias claim

A paramedic who spent years accusing her supervisor of treating her badly because she’s a woman has lost her human rights case, after a tribunal found she used the complaint as cover to gossip about a colleague and insinuate she could get him fired. 

In a decision issued July 29, 2026, tribunal member Shannon Beckett dismissed a paramedic’s human rights complaint against B.C. Emergency Health Services (BCEHS) in its entirety, rejecting both her sex discrimination allegations against a former supervisor and her claim that an eight-day suspension amounted to retaliation for filing the complaint.  

Beckett went further, ordering the worker to pay BCEHS $500 in costs for misusing confidential material she obtained through the tribunal process. 

The worker, a paramedic with more than 27 years at BCEHS, alleged that her unit chief overlooked her twice for a coveted mentoring assignment before she was eventually awarded it, routinely ignored her in favour of a male colleague acting as unit chief, and made disparaging remarks about her to co-workers, at one point calling her a “troublemaker” with an “attitude problem.” 

But none of that, Beckett concluded, was tied to her sex. The more senior candidate for the mentoring role was chosen based on seniority, a point the worker herself accepted at the hearing. And a colleague testified the unit chief made similarly harsh remarks about employees of all genders.  

Beckett noted a 2022 internal report describing a lingering “boys’ club” that some employees said protected wrongdoers, but found the broader culture did not make it any more likely that the unit chief’s treatment of the worker was connected to her sex. 

The retaliation complaint arose separately. In January 2024, a colleague filed a bullying and harassment complaint alleging the paramedic made disparaging comments about him to other paramedics and suggested she had audio recordings that could get him fired.  

BCEHS investigated, interviewing 10 witnesses, and concluded she had shared confidential information and made unsolicited negative comments about the colleague, findings that the worker largely acknowledged during the hearing. 

In May 2024, BCEHS suspended the worker for eight days and required her to complete a respectful workplace course, write an essay on workplace bullying, and review its conduct policies. BCEHS maintained her lengthy disciplinary history, including a written warning and two earlier suspensions for similar conduct dating back to 2017, justified the penalty. 

The paramedic said the discipline was retaliation for her outstanding human rights complaint, telling the tribunal she was barred from discussing its details or playing the audio recordings during the investigation into her conduct. 

Beckett disagreed. She found BCEHS disciplined the worker for breaching its confidentiality and respectful workplace policies, not for speaking about her complaint, writing that the process “cannot serve as a shield against discipline for conduct that breaches workplace standards.” 

Beckett called the paramedic’s retaliation argument “an attempt to use her human rights complaint as justification to gossip” about her colleague, and found the eight-day suspension matched the next step in BCEHS’s progressive discipline framework given her record. 

She also dismissed the worker’s applications for costs and for further disclosure, instead ordering her to pay BCEHS $500 for improperly using confidential audio recordings obtained through the tribunal’s disclosure process to talk about her colleague outside the complaint.