An arbitration panel's decision has revealed the perils of taking an office romance too far.

Two members of the panel, chair James Dorsey and former Vancouver fire chief John McKearney, dismissed a union application to have "surreptitious video footage" excluded from a hearing.

The video shows two Vernon Fire Rescue Services employees having sex in the office of the interim fire chief on March 25.

Two days later, the employees were fired.

The Vernon Professional Firefighters' Association has grieved the dismissals.

The employees' names have not been released.

"The union does not deny the two employees engaged in the activity recorded in the footage, which the union characterizes as 'a deeply personal and compromising interaction'," the decision states. "At the same time, the union does not agree to stipulate for this arbitration to an admission to this activity.

"It asserts the employer must discharge its legal onus to prove each dismissed employee engaged in activity justifying disciplinary dismissal without adducing into evidence privacy invading covert surveillance video camera footage," Dorsey and McKearney noted. "If the employer cannot discharge its onus without reliance on this video footage, its predicament is a consequence of its flawed investigatory approach from which neither the union nor the board has any responsibility to rescue the employer."

The employer maintained that if the video was ruled inadmissible, it would "allow the employees to go unsanctioned for egregious workplace misconduct".

Dorsey and McKearney (now Whistler's fire chief) concluded that "this surreptitious surveillance as conducted by the employer was both a necessary collection of employee personal information for an investigation of employee misconduct and to manage the employment relationship and a reasonable exercise of management authority in all of the circumstances".

"It was narrowly focused surveillance based on a genuinely held suspicion with minimal invasion of employee privacy," they wrote.

The union nominee to the panel, Lorne West, wrote a "partial dissent" from the majority, concluding that the testimony of the interim fire chief was "deceitful".

"His testimony appeared scripted and rehearsed and the evidence in the form of his testimony and notes, appeared fabricated," West wrote. "In totality his testimony and evidence were not believable. In short, I believe he perjured himself throughout his testimony."

West is a retired Surrey firefighter and vice president emeritus of the International Association of Fire Fighters.

None of the panel members viewed the video in reaching their determinations about its admissibility.