Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Absence of any employment contract between the plaintiff and the named defendant, as the employer was a separate legal entity (EURO-PHARM International Canada Inc.).
• Core liability issue framed under extracontractual fault (art. 1457 C.c.Q.) rather than contractual liability, given the defendant’s status as a co-employee.
• Failure of the plaintiff to rebut the presumption of good faith under art. 2805 C.c.Q. and to prove any wrongful conduct by the defendant on a balance of probabilities.
• Credible and consistent testimony from the defendant and multiple company witnesses demonstrating that the plaintiff was dismissed for cause and was himself the source of harassment.
• Insufficient proof of the alleged financial loss and moral damages, even assuming (contrary to the judgment) that some fault could have been established.
• Jurisdictional bar on the Small Claims Division hearing the “reputation”/defamation component of the claim under art. 537 C.C.P., leading to non-consideration of that portion.

Facts of the case

The dispute arises from the dismissal of the plaintiff, Marc Degboe Aboka, from his employment with EURO-PHARM International Canada Inc., a corporation with its own legal personality distinct from its employees. The defendant, Calin Bogdan Rotar, was not the employer but an employee of that company. The plaintiff commenced a small claims action against Rotar personally, claiming that a “false report” by the defendant led to his unjust dismissal. He alleged that this report caused both financial and moral damages. On the financial side, the plaintiff quantified his “loss of income” at 9,400 CAD. On the non-pecuniary side, he claimed 5,600 CAD as moral prejudice, asserting distress and injury to his professional reputation arising from what he characterized as wrongful conduct by the defendant. He pleaded a total of 15,000 CAD in damages combining these heads of claim. The termination letter itself, however, was issued and signed not by the defendant but by Giovanni Daniele, Vice-President of Operations of EURO-PHARM, confirming that it was the corporate employer—not the individual defendant—that formally decided and carried out the dismissal for cause.

Legal issues and applicable law

The Court first addressed whether any contractual claim could lie against the defendant. Because EURO-PHARM was the actual employer and had its own distinct legal personality, the judge found there was no contractual link between the plaintiff and Rotar. As a result, any theory of contractual fault was unavailable against the defendant. This led the Court to examine liability exclusively under the framework of extracontractual (tort-like) responsibility. Article 1457 of the Civil Code of Québec was central. It imposes on every person a general duty to respect rules of conduct so as not to cause injury to others and makes a person who breaches that duty—when endowed with reason—responsible for resulting bodily, moral or material injury. In addition, article 2805 C.c.Q. presumes good faith unless the law expressly requires it to be proved. The plaintiff therefore bore the burden of displacing this presumption by showing that the defendant acted in bad faith or committed a civil fault. More broadly, evidentiary rules on the burden and standard of proof also played a key role. The Court recalled that a party seeking to enforce a right must prove the facts underpinning their claim and that those facts must be established on the balance of probabilities, not with absolute or scientific certainty, but through clear and convincing evidence that makes their existence more likely than their non-existence.

Evidence and credibility assessment

At trial, the defendant and several witnesses associated with EURO-PHARM testified. These included Hussein Farhat, Nader Sharifi, Giovanni Daniele, Hamid Naitali, Elena Caltagirone, Josée Béliveau and Samer Labban. Their testimonies uniformly contradicted the plaintiff’s narrative. The Court found these witnesses credible and persuasive, and it accepted as truthful the contents of documentary exhibits D-1, D-2 and D-3, which supported the employer’s position that the dismissal was for cause. Based on this body of evidence, the judge concluded that it was the plaintiff who harassed company employees, not the other way around. The evidence showed that he repeatedly sent letters, formal notices and messages and continued to bother employees with phone calls despite a prior demand letter dated 30 July 2025 directing him to stop this conduct. The plaintiff’s behavior continued even on the morning of the hearing, when, in the corridor outside the courtroom, he handed further formal notices to witnesses alleging “defamation and harm to reputation” in what the Court viewed as an attempt at intimidation and harassment, accompanied by vulgar language and obscene gestures such as giving the middle finger. In light of this pattern, the judge found the plaintiff to have no credibility and expressly refused to accord any probative value to his testimony.

Findings on liability and jurisdiction

Given the absence of any contractual relationship, the Court held that the plaintiff could not invoke contractual fault against the defendant. Turning to extracontractual liability, the judge found that the plaintiff had failed to rebut the presumption of good faith under article 2805 C.c.Q. and had not established, on a balance of probabilities, any civil fault by the defendant within the meaning of article 1457 C.c.Q. The judgment underscores that the burden rested with the plaintiff to provide clear and convincing evidence of wrongful conduct causing his alleged loss, and this burden was not met. The Court also addressed the plaintiff’s claim relating to damage to reputation. It held that, under article 537 of the Code of Civil Procedure, the Small Claims Division of the Court of Québec lacks jurisdiction over that aspect of the claim. Accordingly, the judge declined to rule on the reputation component on jurisdictional grounds, independently of the plaintiff’s evidentiary deficiencies.

Damages, causation and overall outcome

Because no fault was established and the defendant could not be held liable either contractually or extracontractually, the Court concluded that there was no need to analyze damages in depth. Nonetheless, in an obiter comment, the judge added that even if a fault had been proven, the claim would still have failed because the plaintiff did not adequately prove the quantum of his alleged financial loss or moral damages on the required standard. In the final disposition, the Court rejected the plaintiff’s action in its entirety. The successful party was the defendant, Calin Bogdan Rotar, in whose favour the Court ordered the recovery of judicial costs in the amount of 237 CAD, representing the total monetary award made in this proceeding.