AI-related layoffs ‘do not reflect structural changes driven by technological transformation,’ claims researcher
Canada’s labour protections are not equipped to deal with the speed and scope of job losses linked to artificial intelligence (AI), leaving workers to absorb most of the costs of technological change, a new analysis warns.
Policy choices over recent decades have weakened protections just as AI and other digital technologies begin to reshape workplaces, claims Dilara Baysal, a researcher at Concordia University, in a report published in Policy Options.
“Work no longer provides stability for millions of Canadians,” Baysal writes, citing rising unemployment, declining job quality and the growing risk of AI‑driven displacement. As a result, she concludes, “the labour market is becoming more fragile rather than more resilient.”
Baysal contends this fragility “is not accidental.” Instead, she says it reflects decisions about “how work is organized, how jobs are eliminated or restructured and who bears the risks of economic and technological change.” With “the absence of robust labour protections,” she writes, “adjustment costs” from AI are being shifted onto individual workers.
Previously, one employment lawyer warned that AI in the workplace can be a legal minefield.
Baysal places Canada within a broader trend toward labour‑market deregulation since the early 1990s, undertaken “in the name of flexibility and competitiveness.”
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