Janice Rubin and I have been spending a significant amount of time updating the “Law of Termination in Ontario” book, originally published in 1995. What I’ve come to realize is that while there are a number of technical points which have changed in the Employment Standards Act, 2000 since the book’s debut 15 years ago, the basic employment law concepts remain the same. They are:

1) Employees are still entitled to reasonable notice of termination and the main elements of that calculation remain the same;

2) Termination with cause is still the “capital punishment of employment law”, making termination for cause very difficult for employers to rely on;

3) Termination provisions (especially provisions only entitling employees to Employment Standards Act, 2000 minimums or little more) need to be carefully and expertly crafted to ensure that the employer can rely on them when terminating employees;

4) Most employment law cases are about the sufficiency of notice. The “extras”, such as Wallace damages, mental distress, punitive damages, etc., are generally only awarded in the most extreme cases;

5) An employer’s breach of legislation such as the Human Rights Code, the Employment Standards Act, 2000, the Environmental Protection Act, the Pay Equity Act, the Occupational Health and Safety Act and/or the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act, followed by a termination of an employee can often lead to serious and unforeseen consequences, including an award of the “extras” described above.

As the French saying goes, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same).

Hena Singh