What is the effect of requiring an employee to provide a medical note?

Counsel for the appellant Commission argues that Boisbriand stands for the proposition that social and contextual circumstances may result in discrimination. In this case, those are said to be the fact that M.J. was unable to see her physician before August 8th and the specifics of the form which was given her because she had been off work because of a mental illness, even if that illness was no longer operative at the time. Of course, the difficulty getting an appointment with a doctor, where one is available within the community, may be real and is common to all employees whether suffering from a disabling condition or a minor transitory ailment. A failure to provide a note because of inability to get to a doctor would, in my view, not have the required causal link between the “discriminatory” effect and the policy of requiring notes to support absences for illness. There is no suggestion in the evidence that M. J.’s illness made her reluctant to seek medical assistance. As Iacobucci J. said in Symes v. Canada, 1993 CanLII 55 (SCC), [1993] 4 S.C.R. 695 at p. 764: “We must take care to distinguish between effects which are wholly caused, or are contributed to, by an impugned provision, and those social circumstances which exist independently of such a provision.”