SOBERING THOUGHTS

Casual pot smokers in Alberta who want to work in safety-sensitive
positions had better pack up and move to Ontario. They're no longer
welcome in the oilpatch.

A ruling by the Alberta Court of Appeal gives the green light to
companies to fire -- or refuse to hire -- recreational pot users if
they pose a potential safety risk.

"Extending human rights protections to situations resulting in
placing the lives of others at risk flies in the face of logic," the
court of appeal said in a recent decision.

It concluded Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) had every right to fire a
man from his Syncrude Canada Ltd. job in Fort McMurray because he
failed a pre-employment drug test. John Chiasson, who said he only
toked up on his own time, complained to the Alberta Human Rights
Commisson, arguing that he was being discriminated against on the
basis of disability.

The appeal court justifiably rejected the notion that Chiasson had a
legitimate human rights claim since he wasn't an addict -- simply a
casual pot smoker.

"It's refreshing to see the Alberta Court of Appeal balance workplace
safety issues with human rights issues in the circumstances of a
drug-testing case," says Andrew Robertson, legal counsel for KBR.

Employers have no duty to accommodate recreational drug users, he
points out. "We are entitled to discriminate. We're not entitled to
discriminate on the basis of certain prohibited grounds. Recreational
drug use isn't a prohibited ground."

In liberal Ontario, however, judges have taken an incredibly lenient
view of the subject. In 2000, in an Imperial Oil case, the Ontario
Court of Appeal decided that even casual drug users can be viewed as
addicts and, therefore, drug tests are discriminatory.

More than five years have passed since Chiasson was fired from his
job as a receiving inspector at Syncrude's expansion project and I
haven't been able to track him down. Perhaps he headed to Ontario. In
any case, the contradictory views of two appeal courts over drug
testing will undoubtedly propel the issue to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The upshot of the Alberta ruling is that people who test positive in
pre-employment drug tests will likely not be hired, at least not
unless a dependency is involved, says Robertson. Then the employer
may have to help them with rehab. Chiasson's case was unusual in that
the results of his drug test didn't come in until nine days after he
began work.

What's baffling is that his absurd complaint that he was
discriminated against based on disability because he was a casual pot
smoker was even accepted by the Alberta Human Rights Commission. Were
commission officials smoking pot too?

Even more puzzling is that an Alberta Court of Queen's Bench judge
ruled in 2006 in the case that people who fail drug tests should be
viewed as addicts and given help.

The Alberta Court of Appeal disagreed, concluding that KBR's policy
of ditching workers or applicants who fail drug tests is reasonable
because the company believes that people who use drugs at all are a
safety risk in an already hazardous workplace.

Meanwhile, the larger question is whether pre-employment drug testing
is useful, since it doesn't indicate whether a worker will be
impaired six months down the road.

Drug tests have turned "mild-mannered pot smokers into crackheads"
because coke leaves the body so quickly, one oilpatch worker wrote
the Edmonton Sun the other day.

"Crack cocaine has taken over Fort McMurray," he wrote.

Sounds to me like a pretty good argument for random drug testing of
all employees in safety-sensitive jobs.