Federally regulated employees may soon have a right to disconnect from work.
Within Budget 2024: Fairness for Every Generation (the Budget 2024)[1], introduced on April 16, 2024, the federal government confirmed its intention to move forward with introducing a right for employees to disconnect from work outside of their working hours. Specifically, Budget 2024 proposes to provide CA$3.6 million over five years, starting in 2024-2025, and CA$0.6 million ongoing to enable the federal Labour Program at Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) to implement legislative amendments to the Canada Labour Code to establish such a right.
At this time, no details have been provided about what the right to disconnect would entail. Currently, Ontario is the only province in Canada to have legislation addressing disconnecting from work, specifically imposing a requirement on employers to have a disconnecting from work policy but not going as far as to grant employees a right to disconnect. While it is unknown whether the federal government intends to follow the same structure as Ontario or to take a divergent approach, based on the use of the term “right” in Budget 2024 it is anticipated the federal government’s goal is to provide employees with statutory protection from off-work communications. The expectation would be that if this is the goal, there may be exemptions such as emergency communications.
In addition to the right to disconnect announcement, other employment-related changes contained in Budget 2024 that federally regulated employers will want to be mindful of include the following:
- The ESDC and the Canada Revenue Agency will be entering into data-sharing agreements intended to facilitate inspections to address worker misclassification issues (i.e., contractors who should be classified as employees).
- The federal government intends to propose legislative amendments to the Employment Equity Act designed to modernize the legislation, which was first introduced in 1995. Specifically, the federal government intends to expand designated equity groups (which are currently designated as women, Aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities and visible minorities).
The federal government’s announcement comes at a time when disconnecting from work is increasingly a topic of discussion globally. In January 2021, the European Parliament called for the introduction of a law that would allow employees to disconnect from work during non-work hours without consequences.[2] More recently, on April 8, 2024, a bill was introduced in California that would require employers to establish a policy which provides employees with a right to disconnect from communications during non-working hours (with some specified exceptions).[3]
If you have any questions about the federal government’s announcement or the disconnecting from work trend more generally, please reach out to Larysa Workewych or any member of Dentons’ Employment and Labour group.
[1] https://budget.canada.ca/2024/report-rapport/budget-2024.pdf.
[2] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20210121STO96103/parliament-wants-to-ensure-the-right-to-disconnect-from-work.
[3] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB2751.
