Once a discipline decision is issued, it is final. Exceptions are rare. One exception is where the decision document contains a mistake and does not reflect the decision actually made. Making such a mistake can have significant consequences for a regulator, beyond mere embarrassment.
In Hrabluk v. Manitoba (Education and Early Childhood Learning), 2026 MBKB 115 (CanLII), a male teacher engaged in social media communications with a 13-year-old, grade eight female student. While the messages were not sexual, they were admittedly inappropriate. In Manitoba, the government Minister makes disciplinary decisions (after receiving an investigation report and recommendations from a committee). A letter, signed by the Minister, informed the teacher that his certificate would be suspended for one year. About half an hour later, the teacher was told that the previous email had been sent in error. The next day, another letter from the Minister notified the teacher that his certificate was cancelled.
The teacher sought judicial review. Ordinarily, the deliberations of a decision-maker are privileged and need not be disclosed to a court. However, in the circumstances, the Minister felt compelled to file an affidavit explaining the process by which the wrong decision was issued. She was cross-examined. In essence, the Minister said that while both options were presented to her, she intended to cancel the certificate. A miscommunication with her staff resulted in her signing the wrong decision. She acknowledged that she did not read the decision before signing it and had only given general directions to staff who prepared the two letters.
The Court set aside the cancellation and returned the matter to the Minister for a new decision, making the following points:
- The finality principle did not apply. The Court was satisfied that the Minister had determined to cancel the certificate and a mistake was made. This was not a situation in which the Minister changed her mind after making the first decision.
- There was procedural unfairness in how the Minister developed the reasons for her decision. The Court recognized that a government Minister has many responsibilities and gave some leeway in how her reasons were committed to writing. However, the process was still inadequate.
“Having accepted as I have, that the Minister’s manifest intention was to cancel the teaching certificate, it fell to the Minister to ensure—given the stakes—that her own process in articulating and communicating the reasons for her decision was careful and fair…. Yet with the consequences as high as they were, and a statutory duty to provide written reasons, procedural fairness would seem to dictate that the Minister do more than provide generalized direction to staff and then allow her reasons to be sent out without reading them.”
- The reasons for the cancellation decision were inadequate. They were largely similar to the reasons given for the suspension decision, without explaining why there was a different outcome. The finding that the teacher’s conduct constituted grooming behaviour was conclusory without an explanation of why the evidence supported that finding. In addition, the reasons did not explain why the Minister rejected the teacher’s evidence that he had addressed the issues and was safe to return to teaching, such that a suspension was sufficient.
Regulators will want to have robust systems in place to ensure that only final decisions containing reasons reflecting the substantive thinking of the decision-maker are issued
