It usually arrives as a rumour before it arrives as a fact. Someone didn’t show up Monday. Someone else saw a news item. By Tuesday, the manager is asking HR a question nobody prepared for: one of our people has been charged with a criminal offence, so what are we supposed to do?
The honest answer is that the law asks employers to hold two ideas at once, and most workplace mistakes come from dropping one of them.
Idea one: a charge is not a conviction
The presumption of innocence isn’t a courtroom technicality. In Canada it’s a constitutional guarantee under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and in both Canada and the US it reflects a practical truth employers forget at their peril: a meaningful share of criminal charges end in withdrawal, stay, or acquittal. An employee who is charged today may be fully exonerated in eighteen months, after you’ve fired them, told the team why, and created a wrongful dismissal claim with their name on it.
Charges also often come with strict release conditions: no contact with certain people, geographic restrictions, curfews. The employee themselves may be limited in what they can tell you, because anything they say about the allegations can surface in their criminal case. Good criminal lawyers in Edmonton and elsewhere routinely tell clients to say almost nothing about the facts, even to a sympathetic boss. Don’t read that silence as guilt. Read it as legal advice being followed.
Idea two: you still have a workplace to run
None of that means an employer must sit on its hands. The legitimate questions are practical ones:
Is there a real connection between the charge and the job? A fraud charge matters differently for a bookkeeper than for a warehouse picker. An impaired driving charge matters differently for a delivery driver than for a graphic designer. The tighter the nexus between the alleged conduct and the role, the more room an employer has to act.
Can the employee actually perform the job? Bail conditions, licence suspensions, or custody can make attendance or core duties impossible. That’s a capacity problem you can address regardless of guilt or innocence.
Is anyone at risk? If the charge involves alleged violence or harassment connected to the workplace, safety obligations to other staff come first, and a paid administrative leave while things clarify is often the defensible middle path.
What do your own policies say? Many organizations have never written down how they handle off-duty charges, which means the first case becomes a precedent set in a panic. Write the policy before you need it.
The moves that age well
The employers who come through these situations cleanly tend to do the same few things. They keep the circle small. A charge is not a staff announcement, and reputational harm to the employee is a real legal risk. They document decisions and the business reasons for them. They distinguish between pausing (leave, reassignment, adjusted duties) and punishing (termination), and they don’t reach for the second while the facts are still a press release. And they take advice early: from employment counsel on their own exposure, and, where the situation is tangled up with the criminal process, from a defence perspective on how that process will actually unfold, since criminal timelines are measured in months and years, not news cycles.
The instinct in the first week is always to resolve the situation. Usually the wiser course is to stabilize it. Criminal cases end; the question is whether your organization’s decisions will still look fair, lawful, and proportionate when they do.
Stacey Purser is a criminal defence and appeals lawyer at Purser Law in Edmonton, Alberta.
