At around 2 a.m. on Feb. 10, 2025, a machine operator at Olymel’s Westwyn Court plant in Brampton, Ont., posted some advice to Facebook. If you are experiencing body odour at work, she wrote, speak up. “Or send all immigrants back to their country. Never be bullied into silence!!!”
The timing was not… ideal. She had spent the previous week on administrative leave while human resources investigated reports from seven witnesses that she had told co-workers in the lunchroom that “Indians stink.” When colleagues objected, she informed them it was her mouth and she would say what she wanted. She was due back at work to hear the outcome of that investigation the next day.
Many of her co-workers were also Facebook friends, including her production manager, who took a screenshot. Three days after that, Olymel fired her, ending 27 years of service. An Ontario labour arbitrator has now dismissed her union’s grievance.
The Olymel story is not unique. Views that most people once kept to themselves, or at least kept out of the lunchroom, are now aired with some confidence. The usual suspects get the blame: an American president who treats provocation as policy, a sour public mood on immigration. Neither invented the prejudice. They merely signalled that it could be said out loud.
The signal, it turns out, did not reach HR departments. The volume may have gone up. The price, though, has not come down.
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In January, an Alberta arbitrator upheld the firing of a worker at Building Products of Canada’s Edmonton shingle plant who had called Black co-workers racial slurs, including “monkey.” He had 17 and a half years of service, a clean disciplinary record and had once been union president. The arbitrator rejected the defence that it was all mutual joking. The worker’s threats against colleagues who reported him were taken as evidence he was not sorry.
In Wisconsin last December, a Cinnabon employee mocked a Somali customer’s hijab, used the N-word and announced she was racist and would say so “to the whole entire world.” The customers were filming. The franchise owner fired her immediately.
Even conduct well short of hate speech carries a cost when it travels. In September, the CEO of a Michigan credit union posted a photo of herself and three relatives heading to Halifax in “Lake America” sweatshirts, a reference to the U.S. executive order renaming Lake Ontario. The caption: “Like our sweatshirts? Not sure Canada will.” She later said the sweatshirts were AI-generated and that her sister had reposted the image publicly without the AI label. Within two weeks she was no longer an employee. Her board says Michigan law prevents it from explaining why, which is its own kind of statement.
Detection, meanwhile, has become an industry. Michael McWhorter, who posts on social media as TizzyEnt, asks his millions of followers to identify the people in viral videos of harassment and bigotry. The work has been successful enough to become television: How to Catch a Dirtbag premiered on the Discovery Channel in August. The lunchroom has always had witnesses. Now it has a casting department.
None of this means consequences are automatic or uniform. A competing online fundraiser for the fired Cinnabon worker reportedly raised tens of thousands of dollars, so there is a market for being unrepentant. And the most powerful offenders, those who hold elected office, appear largely immune to anything an employer could do.
Firings don’t always stick
Nor does a firing always stick. In 2015, Hydro One fired a six-figure engineer, after he told a CityNews reporter outside a Toronto FC game that the obscene phrase a man had just shouted at her was hilarious. Six months later, after arbitration, he had his job back. His union said he had written an apology to the reporter, donated to the White Ribbon campaign and attended sensitivity training.
Contrast that to the Olymel ruling — because the Brampton worker also apologized, to a degree. She told the hearing it was wrong to post what she posted. She took diversity courses after her termination. Her union, conceding that serious discipline was warranted, asked only that the lost time be treated as an unpaid suspension.
What undid her was everything else. After the firing, her production manager forwarded four more posts from her account, at least two apparently written during her suspension. One read: “No one will ever silence me.” Another was a re-post urging people never to apologize for who they are, because that would be like saying sorry for being real. At the hearing she said she had not written them or could not recall them. She did not claim to have been hacked, and she agreed the profile picture was hers. The arbitrator found her denial “strains credulity.”
Her memory had other selective features. She signed a sign-in sheet for a May 2023 training session and recalled its content on hairnets, hand-washing and meat handling, but said she had never seen the 12 slides on harassment and discrimination. The arbitrator was unpersuaded, and added that nobody requires a slide deck to know that insulting an entire ethnic group at work is unacceptable.
Tenure counts for something, but it’s not a bulletproof vest
Her 27 years counted as a substantial mitigating factor. It was, the arbitrator found, the only one. The union pointed out that she had used no racial slur. The arbitrator found the distinguishing feature lay elsewhere: in her defiant, publicized belief that her employer was victimizing her.
Arbitrators have always made room for people who say something ugly and then mean their apology. Long service, a first offence and real contrition can still buy a second chance, as Hydro One discovered. What they do not forgive is a worker who treats discipline as persecution and the hearing as another platform.
The rallying cry of the moment is that people are being silenced for speaking their truth. The Olymel file points to a narrower and more practical risk: being taken at your word.
