Despite our collective hope that COVID-19 would vanish in 2021, the pandemic continued to dominate every aspect of our lives this past year, including the workplace. However, much like the previous year, in 2021 there were plenty of important employment law key court decisions which were unrelated to the pandemic. The following is the second half of a two-part article on the top five employment law decisions of 2021, the non-COVID edition.
Ontario statutory severance based on global payroll
Section 64(1) of the Employment Standards Act (ESA) entitles a terminated employee who was employed for five years or more to statutory severance pay if the employer’s annual payroll is $2.5 million or more.
Until recently, the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB) has taken the view that the $2.5-million payroll threshold for the entitlement to statutory severance pay was limited to an employer’s payroll in Ontario. However, in Hawkes v. Max Aicher (North America) Ltd [2021] O.J. No. 3284, the Divisional Court found that it is the employer’s global payroll, rather than the payroll in Ontario, which must be considered for the purpose of statutory severance pay calculation, overturning the OLRB’s decision in this matter.
The court noted that the ESA does not contain an express restriction of the payroll to Ontario, and would have contained such restriction if that was the intention. In addition, the court noted that given that the purpose of the ESA is to...
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