For years, Amber Hedrick was stalked by a representative of one of her insurance brokerage's biggest clients. Her employer's response, a British Columbia judge has now ruled, did more to end her career than the man who was stalking her.
Hedrick, an insurance producer at Johnston Meier Insurance Agencies Ltd. (JMI) in Mission, B.C., spent years being followed, watched, and confronted by a representative of one of the firm's largest accounts. By August 2021, he was trailing her truck home from work. She emailed her branch manager, David Ebner, the next day, torn between her safety and the income the client generated for the firm she'd served for seven and a half years.
Justice L. Bennett of the B.C. Supreme Court found that Ebner's initial response was sympathetic. What followed it was not. According to the judgment, Ebner asked to run the situation by his wife, and Hedrick agreed - but then weeks passed with no follow-up. Hedrick eventually raised the issue again herself, first in an impromptu hallway conversation with Ebner and his wife, then in a September 9 meeting Ebner had actually called to discuss cutting her pay. Objective evidence later showed he'd already instructed payroll to cut her monthly draw from $10,000 to $7,000 the day before that meeting took place. Days later she discovered the reduction on her paycheque without any warning. When she separately asked to work temporarily from a second property to put distance between herself and her stalker, he refused and threatened to reassign her assistant.
In the weeks that followed, with no real intervention from her employer, Hedrick's mental health deteriorated to the point of suicidal ideation. Her last day at work was October 4, 2021, when she went on medical leave; she never returned. Nearly a year later, WorkSafeBC determined she had developed permanent PTSD and major depressive disorder, restricting her from ever returning to JMI, working with her former manager, or working with the client whose representative had stalked her. JMI terminated her employment three weeks later, arguing the contract had been frustrated by circumstances beyond its control.
Justice Bennett didn't accept that framing.
To succeed with a frustration-of-contract defence, an employer must show the supervening event wasn't its fault. JMI argued the stalking was entirely the fault of a third party. The court disagreed, finding JMI's own conduct - not just the stalker's - contributed materially to Hedrick's injuries.
The judge's credibility findings did much of the work here. Hedrick's testimony was detailed and unshaken under cross-examination. Ebner's, by contrast, leaned repeatedly on some version of "I don't recall" - including, notably, denying he'd ordered Hedrick's pay cut a full day before he had, in fact, instructed payroll to make the change. HR manager Nikki Wood's account also unravelled under cross-examination, conceding she'd done little to investigate Hedrick's bullying complaint and had never reached out before terminating her.
The court stopped short of calling JMI's conduct malicious. It found the company's response "insensitive, unprofessional, or improper" - serious enough to defeat the frustration defence and establish wrongful dismissal, but not egregious enough to justify aggravated or punitive damages.
For insurers and employers watching this case, the more consequential ruling may be on WorkSafeBC benefits. Canadian courts have long split on whether to deduct disability payments from wrongful dismissal damages, and JMI leaned on that division, arguing that letting Hedrick keep both would amount to double recovery.
Justice Bennett split the difference in a way that could shape future arguments. Benefits paid while Hedrick's condition was still classified as temporary - intended, per WorkSafeBC's own case manager, to substitute for lost wages - were deductible in principle. But benefits paid after her injuries were reclassified as permanent, funded through vocational rehabilitation and permanent-disability channels rather than wage-loss channels, served an entirely different purpose: compensating for the injury itself, not for wages the employer's severance was replacing. Those weren't deductible.
The distinction matters because, as the court noted, WorkSafeBC recipients often can't tell the difference from their payment amounts alone - the money looks identical regardless of which "pocket" it comes from. Employers relying on Waterman v. IBM Canada to justify offsetting disability payments against notice damages will need to look more closely at what stage of a claim those payments actually represent.
Bennett awarded Hedrick nine months' pay in lieu of notice - $116,136 - calculated on the average of her last three years' commission income rather than her final, diminished year, which the court found had been suppressed by the very events at issue. No deduction was made for failure to mitigate; the court accepted that Hedrick's PTSD and depression made a sustained job search unreasonable to expect.
