New Canada Labour Code regulations intend to close wage gaps — with fines for non-compliance
Federally regulated employers who spent the last few years working through pay equity compliance may be tempted to think they've already done the hard work — but that might not be entirely true, according to one expert.
The new equal treatment regulations coming into force Oct. 20, 2026, under the Canada Labour Code operate on a fundamentally different logic than pay equity. Where pay equity compares broad job classes across an organization, the equal treatment rules are a person-to-person analysis.
"With equal pay for equal work, we're truly looking at the individuals," says Sophie Arsenault, a partner at Fasken in Ottawa. "It has to be very much like a personal analysis, versus with pay equity, you're looking at large classes of people."
That said, any preparatory work is not wasted when it comes to the new regulations, she says.
"I would hope that many federally regulated employers that have gone through… the pay equity exercise will have done an internal cleanup of their job titles, their job classes in general, so that it will make that exercise easier compared to starting afresh.”
The regulations — formally titled the Regulations Amending Certain Regulations Made Under the Canada Labour Code (Equal Treatment and Temporary Help Agencies) (SOR/2026-75) — were recently published in the Canada Gazette, and implement provisions from the 2018...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump released a trove of documents during a primetime address to the nation that allies had hyped as a smoking gun that would prove his long-debunked allegation...