BC Court Says Remote Work Isn't a Perk. It's a Contract.

Tracy Parolin worked for Cressey Construction for 18 years. She rose to director of marketing. In 2013, the company allowed her flexible hours to manage childcare. By 2020, as the world locked down, those flexible hours became a formal remote work arrangement—a concession granted to address health concerns for one of her children. For three years, she worked from home. The company approved it. Her paychecks came on schedule. Everyone understood the deal.

Then in May 2023, a new supervisor walked into a meeting about a salary increase and revoked the entire arrangement. Return to the office full time, effective immediately. No negotiation. No discussion of the circumstances that had made remote work essential to her life. Just an order, dressed up as a business decision.

Parolin sued. And on this week, the British Columbia Court of Appeal ruled she'd been constructively dismissed. The court found that her work-from-home arrangement had become part of her employment agreement—binding, enforceable, and not subject to unilateral revocation. No fancy contract language. No legal preamble. Just 18 years of approval, support, and reliance.

The case is Cressey Construction Corporation v. Parolin, 2026 BCCA 199, and it may be the most significant ruling on remote work since the pandemic forced the issue out of the realm of nicety and into contract law. The trial judge awarded Parolin 19 months' pay in lieu of notice. The appeal court upheld the logic. And now, every employment lawyer in Canada and beyond is rereading their contracts.

Howard Levitt, an employment lawyer based in Toronto, distilled the ruling into what should be obvious but apparently wasn't to Cressey's executives: "It has long been the law that if people are being allowed to work from home, (and) they have not signed a contract saying the company can recall them at any time, and enough time goes by, as it certainly has by now for most people, calling them back to the office is a constructive dismissal."

Let that sink in. The law on this point wasn't new. But the application to remote work—to the specific, urgent question of whether three years of uninterrupted work-from-home constitutes an enforceable term of employment—now has teeth.

For years, companies treated remote work as a discretionary perk, something they granted and could revoke at will. The pandemic forced millions of workers home, and some employers have spent the past three years trying to drag them back. Return-to-office mandates have become a corporate obsession, a symbol of control and culture and the unmissable spark of in-person genius, despite mounting evidence that it's largely theater. The mandate has become the message: we own your location; we set the terms.

But the Parolin ruling suggests the courts disagree. Not every remote work arrangement becomes automatically binding—the judge was careful about that. Melanie Harmer, a Vancouver-based employment lawyer, noted that employers who temporarily sent people home "only because of the pandemic" will have better legal footing to call them back. The distinction matters. A pandemic emergency is different from a three-year-long, company-approved arrangement tied to a specific employee's circumstances.

The practical implication is ruthless: employers who want to retain the right to revoke remote work should have written it into the contract, explicitly and upfront. They should have stated, in so many words, that work-from-home is temporary, conditional, subject to recall. Anything less, anything ambiguous, anything that looks like approval stretched across years of silence—that's now a potential liability.

For workers, the ruling is straightforward. If your employer has allowed you to work remotely for years without a written caveat reserving the right to revoke it, you have contractual ground to stand on. You're not begging for a favor anymore. You have an enforceable term of employment. Try to rip it away without cause, and you'll owe me notice—real notice, the kind that costs money.

The ruling is specific to British Columbia's jurisprudence, but employment law has a way of traveling. Courts in other Canadian provinces will cite it. Labor lawyers in the US, the UK, and across Europe will study it. The precedent won't be binding everywhere, but it's persuasive, and it codifies something workers have intuited since 2023: remote work, when it's established and supported long enough, stops being a gift and becomes a contract.

Corporate culture warriors will call it a setback. The return-to-office movement was always about control, and control just got harder to exercise. But for Tracy Parolin and thousands of workers in similar positions, it's something simpler: a court finally saying that if you've been doing your job well from home for years, and your employer has been collecting those dividends without objection, they can't just snap their fingers and erase the arrangement. You're not a perk they can revoke. You're an employee with a contract.

The British Columbia court didn't invent this principle. It just applied it, carefully and precisely, to the question that's defined the modern workplace: where do we work, and who decides?