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Brake said she is looking forward to her former employer finally paying up. But Brake doesn’t have any intention of quitting her current job — she had to dip into her retirement savings to survive after she left McDonald’s.

“I haven’t got anything yet,” said Brake. “Yes, it’s a lot of money but at the end of the day I have to watch every cent to keep on living.”

The owners of the McDonald’s franchise could still try to appeal the case to the Supreme Court of Canada, but the test for cases is stringent. Only a small percentage of cases are ever heard by the country’s top court.

A lawyer representing the McDonald’s franchise didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment Tuesday.

“My gut tells me this is over,” said Brake’s lawyer, Miriam Vale Peters. “Five years later she’ll see her money. That’s the reality of Esther Brake.”

This is a case that I never thought would go this far

Vale Peters said she never expected the case to drag on as long as it has.

“This is a case that I never thought would go this far,” she said. “In my experience, 99 cases out of 100 settle. I’m surprised, and I continued to be surprised up until the day I was to be in court, that we were still there.”

The court noted in an earlier decision that the judgments in the case could have been avoided if the McDonald’s offers to settle weren’t so “woefully inadequate.”

Brake said people have come up to her in the Home Depot store where she works now and told her they were proud of her for taking McDonald’s to court. Brake said she feels vindicated by the decisions from the two courts.

“The first thing I would tell anybody is, if they feel they are being treated unfairly — it’s a tough battle, I’m not saying it’s an easy battle — I tell them, ‘Go for it. Don’t hold back. Go for it.’ If you tell the truth, you could win.”