Independent Contractors vs. Employees in Ontario It is common for businesses to treat workers as independent contractors when, in law, they may actually be employees. That distinction matters. In Ontario, adjudicators can look beyond the label used in a contract and decide that a worker who was called a contractor was misclassified and should be … Read More
It is a common misconception that an employee who has worked for a short period of time is entitled to only a modest amount of severance or notice on termination. In Ontario, that is not necessarily the case. Where there is no enforceable employment agreement limiting termination entitlements, an employee may be entitled to substantial … Read More
Introduction In Timmins v. Artisan Cells, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice considered a familiar but important termination scenario: an employer paid less than the employee was contractually owed and then tried to use the remaining severance as leverage to obtain a full and final release. The court found that this conduct repudiated the employment … Read More
Overview The Ontario Court of Appeal’s decision in Ontario Public Service Employees Union v. Ontario (Attorney General), 2026 ONCA 74, provides important guidance for unionized employers and public sector stakeholders considering the constitutional risks and limits of back-to-work legislation. The case arose from Ontario’s 2017 college faculty strike. After five weeks of strike action, the … Read More
Introduction In Bertsch v. Datastealth Inc., 2025 ONCA 379, the Ontario Court of Appeal confirmed that a properly drafted termination clause limiting an employee’s entitlements to the minimums under the Employment Standards Act, 2000 can be enforceable. For employers, the decision is a useful reminder that careful drafting matters: a clause that clearly tracks the … Read More
Termination Clauses Continue to Face Close Scrutiny For human resources professionals, termination clauses are often drafted with the goal of creating certainty. Employers want language that clearly defines what happens if employment ends without cause, and they want that language to be enforceable. Recent Ontario decisions, however, continue to show that wording matters a great … Read More
For decades, there was a kind of “rule of thumb” in Canadian wrongful dismissal employment law: if you were wrongfully dismissed, the most you could expect for reasonable notice was about 24 months. This wasn’t written in any statute, but it was treated as an unofficial ceiling by courts across the country. That rule, however, … Read More
