On employment law
Chris Andre is a lawyer from Lawrences law firm in Brampton and is a colleague of Rotarian Rob VanKessel. He presented to us some of the important aspects of employment law for employers. www.lawrences.com
Recently the province has introduced the end of mandatory retirement at age 65. This has put businesses in a position where they need to assess what they want to do with their employees that are approaching that age. They can no longer count on employment law for that employee to leave at age 65 but must be proactive in their plans for employees.
There are some changes on how employment law cases are handled. The human rights commission will no longer be investigating the complaint before it goes to the tribunal. It will now just go straight to hearing. The positive aspect of this is that there should be no more backlog in the community, however, the negative aspect is that there will not be a third party investigating the claim.
More employment standards officers and health and safety officers are being hired to enforce The Employment Standards Act, so they can do more proactive inspections or "surprise audits". The inspections will likely target specific industries based on the number of claims to WSIB. Peel will now have more than double the number of inspectors, 2500 inspections this year compared to 51 a couple of years ago. Companies can now be fined for violations, however there is an appeal process but they must be able to show that they did not do anything wrong.
An area of concern for employers is the hiring of independent contractors. The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has several tests that must be met for the contract to be deemed an independent contractor and not an employee. If they find that the contractor is really an employee then the employer will have to pay the CPP, EI, etc of that individual. See CRA's web site www.cra.gc.ca for the Employee or Self Employment test.
An important tool for every employer is the written employment agreement. This allows the employer to manage their future liability to the employee from the onset. Not only does it allow for protection of confidential information, it determines from the start of employment how much notice the employee will receive and what they could receive in lieu of notice.