Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Judicial review focused on whether the Tribunal administratif du travail (TAT) reasonably linked the worker’s bilateral plantar fasciitis to an earlier accepted work-related knee injury.
• Core evidentiary dispute concerned the weight to be given to competing medical opinions, particularly between a general practitioner in musculoskeletal medicine and a treating podiatrist.
• The employer challenged the TAT’s treatment of one physician (Dr. Hurtubise) as a non-expert and the Tribunal’s preference for other medical reports.
• Credibility and timing of symptom onset were central, including whether the worker’s testimony about earlier foot pain could be rejected for lack of contemporaneous medical notes.
• The Superior Court emphasized deference to the TAT’s role as a specialized tribunal in assessing evidence and credibility, intervening only if the decision fell outside the range of reasonable outcomes.
• The judicial review was dismissed, confirming that minor reasoning flaws at the TAT level did not amount to unreasonableness warranting intervention.

Background and parties

Les Forges de Sorel Cie is the employer, and the proceedings arise in the context of Québec’s occupational health and safety and workers’ compensation regime. The worker, Guy Boulanger, suffered a recognized work accident on 23 May 2020, specifically a right knee sprain with a meniscus tear. Following this accident, he was absent from work until 20 June 2020. After returning to work, he developed bilateral plantar fasciitis. He then filed a claim with the Commission des normes, de l’équité, de la santé et de la sécurité du travail (CNESST) asserting that the plantar fasciitis was causally related, at least in part, to the original work injury and its consequences. The CNESST and, ultimately, the Tribunal administratif du travail (TAT) became involved in determining whether there was a sufficient causal link between the compensable knee injury and the later foot condition. The TAT rendered a decision in 2024 allowing the worker’s appeal and recognizing the relationship between the bilateral plantar fasciitis and the original accident. The employer then brought an application for judicial review before the Superior Court of Québec, naming the TAT as defendant and the CNESST and Mr. Boulanger as parties in interest.

Facts underlying the dispute

The core factual background begins with the 23 May 2020 industrial accident. The worker sustained a right knee injury, diagnosed as a sprain with a meniscus tear, which led to a work absence of nearly a month. After his return to work around 20 June 2020, he was placed on temporary assignment. According to the worker, however, the duties assigned during this period did not comply with his functional limitations and involved tasks incompatible with his injury restrictions. Over the months following his return, he began to experience pain in his feet, more particularly in his left foot, which was later diagnosed as bilateral plantar fasciitis. In his testimony before the TAT, the worker asserted that symptoms consistent with plantar fasciitis in his left foot began as early as July 2020, less than one month after returning to work. He maintained that the nature of his modified duties and the altered way he bore weight and moved due to his knee injury contributed to the development of his foot problems. The medical records and physiotherapy notes did not contain early references to heel or foot pain, and this absence of documentation became a focal point of the employer’s evidentiary arguments. Nonetheless, the worker’s account was found credible by the TAT, which considered his oral testimony alongside the medical material before it.

Medical evidence and expert opinions

The evidentiary record before the TAT included multiple medical opinions, and their respective weight formed a central issue. On the employer’s side, Dr. Michel Hurtubise, a general practitioner with a practice largely in sports and musculoskeletal medicine, prepared a written expert report and testified. In his view, plantar fasciitis is typically multifactorial and, in this case, constituted a degenerative personal condition that had evolved over years rather than being precipitated by the 2020 workplace accident. He opined that the worker’s plantar fasciitis symptoms emerged only in November 2020, although he conceded that symptoms might have begun a few weeks or months earlier. Dr. Hurtubise heavily emphasized the absence of contemporaneous documentation of foot pain in the medical and physiotherapy notes and refused to acknowledge earlier symptom onset in the absence of such written records. He also understood that the worker’s temporary assignment involved modified duties that did not entail overuse of the left lower limb, and this assumption underpinned his conclusion that the work situation likely did not cause or significantly contribute to the plantar fasciitis. The worker, however, testified that the assignments were not genuinely compatible with his limitations and that they aggravated his condition. On the worker’s side, the record included a report from podiatrist Dr. Abran, who had treated the worker and whose writings the TAT relied upon even though he did not testify. There was also a report from another physician, Dr. Sutton, which Dr. Hurtubise commented on during his testimony. The TAT considered this array of evidence and analyzed whether the original knee injury and resulting functional changes could be considered one of multiple contributing causes to the plantar fasciitis.

Approach of the Tribunal administratif du travail

The TAT framed the key questions in its reasons, and those questions and the criteria it chose to apply were not themselves challenged on judicial review. Instead, the employer focused on how the TAT evaluated the evidence. In its decision, the TAT noted that Dr. Hurtubise had not been formally recognized as an “expert” during the hearing, partly because the employer’s counsel had not requested such a qualification. It then indicated that his opinion would not be preferred over that of the podiatrist or other medical sources. The Superior Court later acknowledged that the TAT’s initial statement—that the doctor was not an expert because no formal qualification was sought—was inaccurate as a matter of evidentiary practice; a witness can provide opinion evidence without a formal expert designation where there is no objection and where their expertise is apparent. Despite this misstep, the TAT’s broader reasoning made clear that it discounted Dr. Hurtubise’s opinion primarily because it rested on factual assumptions that the TAT did not accept, including the belief that the worker’s duties were genuinely modified and that there was no earlier foot pain due to its absence from clinical notes. The TAT preferred the worker’s credible testimony about his symptoms and work tasks and found that an absence of written proof in medical files did not equate to proof that symptoms did not exist. It also treated the podiatrist’s opinion as probative and potentially more specialized on foot conditions than that of a general practitioner, which it considered reasonable in light of the technical nature of plantar fasciitis.

Judicial review framework and standard of review

Before the Superior Court, both parties agreed that the applicable standard of review was reasonableness as articulated by the Supreme Court of Canada in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v. Vavilov. Under this framework, the court’s task is to assess whether the TAT’s decision falls within a range of possible, acceptable outcomes defensible in fact and law, not to decide the case anew. The reasonableness analysis involves two main aspects: internal coherence of the reasoning and its justification in light of the legal and factual constraints bearing on the decision. The Superior Court emphasized that judicial review targets the legality of the administrative decision, not its wisdom or desirability, and that the court cannot recast itself as an appeal body or conduct a de novo assessment of the evidence. The judgment also highlighted that, even after Vavilov, deference remains central when specialized administrative tribunals decide matters within their core expertise. In the field of occupational injury and workers’ compensation, the TAT is considered a highly specialized body with extensive experience in evaluating medical evidence and determining causal links between work accidents and subsequent conditions. The Superior Court further reiterated that not every error justifies quashing an administrative decision. The reviewing court must be satisfied that any shortcomings are serious enough to render the decision unreasonable by undermining its justification, intelligibility, or transparency. Minor or incidental flaws do not suffice.

Assessment of the alleged errors

The employer advanced three main grounds to challenge the TAT’s decision as unreasonable: first, that the TAT erred by stating that Dr. Hurtubise had not testified as an expert and by treating this as a basis to discount his opinion; second, that it unreasonably preferred the opinion of podiatrist Dr. Abran regarding the causal link between the plantar fasciitis and the work accident; and third, that it disregarded established facts about the timing of the worker’s heel pain and relied instead on hearsay or speculative hypotheses. On the first point, the Superior Court agreed that the TAT’s assertion about expert status was unfortunate and technically incorrect. However, it concluded that this was not the determining factor in the TAT’s analysis. When read as a whole, the reasons showed that the TAT discounted the doctor’s report because it was built on assumptions contradicted by the evidence, such as the nature of the temporary assignment and the insistence that symptoms could not have existed earlier if they were not recorded. The TAT’s rejection of this opinion was thus rooted in its fact-finding and credibility assessments. On the second point, the court held that it was not unreasonable for the TAT to rely on the podiatrist’s written report despite his not having testified. An administrative tribunal may accept expert opinion from any professional whose training or experience can assist on a technical question that lies beyond ordinary knowledge. In matters concerning the feet, it was entirely rational to regard a podiatrist as having at least equivalent, and possibly greater, expertise than a general practitioner, particularly a practitioner whose assumptions about the factual record had been rejected. Regarding the third point, the Superior Court underscored that absence of proof is not proof of absence. The TAT was entitled to find the worker’s oral testimony credible and to infer that symptoms of plantar fasciitis could have existed before they were first noted in files. The tribunal’s choice to credit this testimony and to treat the lack of documentation as a neutral, rather than decisive, factor was well within its fact-finding discretion.

Outcome and implications

Having reviewed the TAT’s reasoning through the lens of Vavilov, the Superior Court concluded that the decision met the threshold of reasonableness. The TAT had grappled with the evidence, weighed competing medical opinions, explained why it rejected parts of the employer’s expert’s analysis, and drew conclusions that fell squarely within the range of acceptable outcomes. Its mistaken comment about the formal recognition of expert status did not amount to a serious defect undermining the integrity of the decision. The court stressed the need for “very great deference” to the TAT on matters tied to the existence and characterization of a workplace injury, especially when the tribunal is assessing credibility and reconciling medical evidence. In the result, the Superior Court dismissed the employer’s application for judicial review and confirmed the TAT’s decision that recognized a causal relationship, at least in part, between the original work-related knee injury and the subsequent bilateral plantar fasciitis. The judgment orders that the judicial review be rejected “with court costs,” but it does not specify any particular monetary amount for costs, benefits, damages, or other awards. Accordingly, while the successful party is effectively the worker, Guy Boulanger (whose favourable TAT decision remains in force), the total amount of any monetary award or costs in his favour cannot be determined from this judgment.