The Ontario legislature is poised to make more changes to
Employment and Labour legislation. As we previously discussed,
there have been a number of important changes to the Employment
Standards Act, 2000 ("ESA"), and to the Labour Relations
Act, 1995 ("LRA"), in the past year. Initially, the
Liberal government made a number of significant reforms by adopting
Bill 148, Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act, 2017, into law in late
2017. A year later, the current Conservative government, repealed
most of the changes introduced by Bill 148, by adopting into law,
Bill 47, Making Ontario Open for Business Act, 2018, effectively
making
what was old, new again.
On December 6, 2018, the legislature again introduced new
changes to the statutory labour and employment regime of the
province. While Bill 66, Restoring Ontario's Competitiveness
Act ("Bill 66"), makes changes to a wide swath of laws,
the ESA and the LRA are subject to some new tweaks.
