The horror stories of the hours of a working lawyer are infamous. But they can’t be that bad, because this lawyer had enough time to pick up a second legal job.
Diane Way was gainfully employed as a lawyer in Toronto with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).
We can only speculate, but perhaps looking at other people’s taxes all day made Way want more. Way more.
She took up a new job in Ottawa with the Canadian Forces Grievance Board (CFGB). The thing is, Way conveniently forgot to quit her first job.
She worked at the CFGB for a week, using vacation time with the CRA. The next week, she returned to CRA, calling in sick for a week at the CFGB.
The third week she showed up again at CFGB, using more CRA vacation time. But this time she got caught when her new job called her old one to check her references.
It’s unclear if Way intended to declare income from both jobs, but in any case both employers let her go.
She took the issue to the Public Service Labour Relations Board to get her job back, claiming she was just doing a job shadow or an unpaid internship.
As a former CRA employee, she probably should have known that her revenues were hardly a secret.
In addition to being a lawyer, Way also has four university degrees.
But the best part is that she hired a paralegal to represent her, probably realizing that this lawyer had already made enough mess of the situation.
h/t Sharon Kour of UWO Law
It is unfortunate that those outside the case can only rely on the creative writing of the outbound adjudicator (the pratfall of no recorder or transcriber), and the desperate beat writer one broken pencil away from a pink slip could not patiently await the consent from the subject of the story before delving into material over his head.
Sadly, many missed out completely on “the best part”- the very newsworthy and controversial item that apparently more than counsel for CRA wanted to bury.
We are sadly left with no true story to digest (so far), and another example of big government prepared to make a citizen’s livelihood expendable to save its own skin (and image).
The issues would likely not be unreported income; it would conflict-of-interest. I am fairly certain that she would receive a T4 slip from both employers.
The editorial has no educational value. It is written by a wannabee lawyer that relies on fabrication instead of facts.
As a 3rd year business student, we have been assigned Ms. Way’s case to re-open in a classroom arbitration. My teammates are defending Ms. Way and are looking into other possible ways for Ms. Way to be re-instated to her former job at the CRA. I would love to hear from her personally – but do not think that will happen. Although, there are many different approaches that are favoritable for Ms. Way.
Any comments to help my teammates and I are welcome, as we would love to see other insights. Especially since the two jobs in question do not seem to conflict with one another.
Please email me if you have suggestions that we could investigate.
Thank you.
cvanhal12@hotmail.com
It is unfortunate that “Cindy”, 3rd Year Student, did not attempt to contact either or both Ms. Day or her former legal representation. She and her class mates would have found both individuals quite forthcoming, candid, and willing under the appropriate circumstances to not only discuss the case but what had been discovered in the preparatory examination of the case- a matter of a genre W5 or the 5th Estate would pursue keenly, a theme revisited time and again by investigative journalism, and would undoubtedly have encountered resistance and supressive efforts by certain individuals on the government side of the ledger. Now, years later, it is a moot point.