Clarity Comes To Wage Claims Under The Canada Labour Code

Amendments to the Canada Labour Code provide certainty and restraint to the damages available to employees who file a wage claim under the CLC. Organizations subject to federal regulation of the workplace should be attentive to these changes.

As many employers governed by the Canada Labour Code ("CLC") have learned to their dismay, until now, the CLC did not impose any deadline for filing CLC complaints, nor was there any cap on the total amount of back wages that could be recovered/awarded. The employee's ability to prove the entitlement imposed the only practical limitation on recovery.  (As a matter of informal practice, because the CLC requires an employer to keep records for 3 years, often the records did not exist to support a longer look-back period.  But if the records were still in existence, then in theory, an ex-employee could complain years after a termination, and could seek amounts reaching back to day 1 of the employment relationship.)