Who thought employment standards weren’t exciting?! Yesterday, the Ontario government passed Bill 47, Making Ontario Open for Business Act, 2018, reversing most of Bill 148.  2018 has seen a slew of changes to the Ontario Employment Standards Act, most of which are now all undone.

See our recent blog post on Bill 47 for a summary of the changes.  Here is a link to the full Bill 47 on the government website.

Bill 47 highlights include:

• freezing the minimum wage rate at $14 until 2020, at which point it will be tied to inflation
• repealing the various scheduling changes that required minimum pay for on-call and short shifts
• replacing the 10 PEL days with 3 sick days, 2 bereavement days, 3 family responsibility days, all unpaid and no restriction on medical notes
• repealing the equal pay for equal work provision (not to be confused, however, with Pay Equity, which still does require equal pay between men and women for equal work – phew!)

Bill 47 does not just freeze Bill 148 changes, but rather, it also makes some new amendments to the Ontario Employment Standards Act.  Employers thus cannot simply drop their 2017 policies back into circulation.  Stay tuned for further updates from us or contact us directly to help update your workplace policies generally.

Let’s hope this is the last big round of amendments for a couple of years.