Statutory severance
What’s wrong with this picture? Settlement excludes amount of vacation pay owing
In Ontario, employers owe vacation pay on employee wages. Wages are defined in section 1 of the Employment Standards Act to include “any payment required to be made by an employer to an employee.” Here is where it gets tricky. In Ontario, the employment standards may require two separate types of payments to an employee who is terminated without cause.
Employer paid no notice or severance when it terminated employee of 36 years without cause
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice just decided that an employer terminated a 65-year-old long-term employee without the proper amount of notice or severance. As a result, the employer had to pay hefty damages, interest and costs award
Is severance pay required when an employee is terminated?
When I speak at conferences, I am often asked the following question: “Is severance pay required when an employee is terminated?”
Before this question can be answered, we have to first confront the difficulty that some payroll terms traditionally used to describe both termination, as well as any payments resulting from this event, haven’t always been defined with the greatest of clarity. My preference has always been for those terms that convey the clearest meaning of the related employment standards and source deduction requirements.
Ontario Ministry of Labour online severance tool
The Ontario Ministry of Labour has a new online Severance Entitlement Tool to help employers and HR professionals determine when a terminated employee is entitled to statutory severance pay.










