There’s another serious risk to laying off long-term employees: wrongful dismissal lawsuits. “You can’t discriminate against somebody on the basis of age,” says Doug MacLeod, an employment and labour lawyer with MacLeod Law Firm, based in Toronto. “There are some cases where human rights abdicators have concluded that employers who terminate older people are doing so on the assumption the longer you work there, the higher your salary and pension costs are going to be, and they have concluded that that kind of reason for termination is age discrimination under human rights legislation.”