Standard hours of work in Ontario are 44 hours or less per week. Employees are entitled to their regular wage rate for work during these 44 or fewer hours per week. If employees work more than the standard hours in a week, overtime kicks in and employees must be paid at the overtime rate. Overtime applies to weeks, not days Overtime is calculated by weeks only, not individual days. In other words, an employee does…

Table of Contents When should an employer issue an ROE in case of termination of employment? Section 19(3)(i) of the Employment Insurance Regulations (SOR/96-332) (“the Regulations”) state that an employer must issue the Record of Employment (“ROE”) within 5 days after the employee’s earnings are “interrupted”. According to section 14(1) of the Regulations, an “Interruption” of earnings is when: “an insured person is laid off or separated [i.e. a resignation or termination] from employment and has…

Table of Contents What is termination pay? Termination pay is money awarded to an employee by their employer for loss of employment. The amount of termination pay awarded is the amount of income which the employee would have earned from his employer during the period of required “reasonable notice”. What is reasonable notice? At common law, an employee is entitled to, in the absence of express agreement in a termination clause in an employment contract,…

Sometimes, an employer decides to force an executive to sign a new contract while they are still working (usually in case of promotion, or because the executive doesn’t have a contract already, or the employer wants to update the termination clause in an existing contract, or because the employer simply thinks the executive earns too much compensation). However, employees and employers alike should consider that the demand to sign a new contract could trigger a…

Almost everyone in Ontario is entitled to ‘severance pay’ unless that person is terminated for just cause. However, keep in mind that there are two kinds of severance pay: Common law severance pay; and Statutory severance pay. Almost everyone has a right to common law severance pay and everyone who worked for 5 years at an employer with a $2.5 million dollar payroll is entitled to statutory severance pay.  What is the difference between common…

There is no rule that 24 months’ is the absolute maximum amount of reasonable notice a long-standing, senior employee can receive in Ontario (see my earlier blog post on the topic here). To that effect, in Lowndes, the Ontario Court of Appeal observed that calculating reasonable notice is “case-specific” and, while there is “no absolute upper limit or ‘cap’ on what constitutes reasonable notice, “exceptional circumstances” may support a notice period in excess of…

Question: How much severance am I owed in Ontario? Lawyer Answer: The first thing we do when calculating how much severance an employee in Ontario is entitled to is to check their employment contract for a termination clause. If the employee has a termination clause in their contract, then we determine what it promises in case of termination. We also check to see if the termination clause is enforceable. If the termination clause says the…