Questions of Fact and Law
   
A Tribunal decision related to a union practice that discriminated against women (reviewed in Legal Report 2000) was appealed to the Federal Court for a number of alleged legal errors and erroneous findings of fact. ²⁶²One error of law that appeared on the face of the record concerned the decision of the Tribunal to review and rule on preliminary objections of the union related to the timeliness of the complaint. While the Tribunal had acknowledged that its jurisdiction to review the decision of the Commission to extend the time limit for filing a complaint was problematic (due to diverging lines of jurisprudence), it nonetheless concluded that it had the authority to rule on the union's submissions in this regard. The Federal Court concluded that the Tribunal had erred against a standard of correctness by so ruling, though it also found that the error was inconsequential to the decision on the merits of the complaint and thus could not be used to overturn it.

Regarding alleged errors of mixed fact and law, the Federal Court applied a standard of reasonableness simpliciter. Despite arguments put forward by the Union, the Court could find no misinterpretation of the law in the Tribunal's understanding of the three-pronged test in the Shakes decision²⁶³ for determining if a prima facie case of discrimination had been established. Furthermore the Tribunal was correct to have modified this test to conform to the specific features of the Union dispatch system in determining whether a discriminatory practice existed. Moreover, the application of this test to the facts of the complaint satisfied the standard of reasonableness simpliciter.

There were also no findings of fact by the Tribunal that could be said to have been made in a perverse or capricious manner, or without regard to the evidence before it. In other words, there was nothing patently unreasonable about the inferences drawn by the Tribunal from the evidence placed before it, nor with respect to other facts established by the evidence. Nor was the Tribunal obliged to recite every piece of evidence placed before it in explaining its final decision. The presiding judge of the Federal Court found that "taking into account the totality of the reasons of the Tribunal, I am satisfied its findings of fact...were reasonably open to it, particularly against a standard of review of patent unreasonableness which I am satisfied is the appropriate standard in respect of such findings of fact by a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal."²⁶⁴

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End Notes