There is a quiet fiction at the center of many aesthetic businesses.
A stylist rents a chair. An injector works under a services agreement. An aesthetician invoices the clinic. Everyone calls them independent contractors. The arrangement feels normal because it is normal, at least in the industry sense. It is how salons, spas, and aesthetic medicine clinics have operated for years.
But legal risk often hides inside practices that feel ordinary.
In Ontario, a worker is not an independent contractor simply because a contract says so. Nor because they issue invoices, collect HST, or prefer the flexibility. Those details matter, but they are not determinative. Courts and tribunals will look past the label and examine the substance of the relationship. The Supreme Court of Canada confirmed this in the leading case on the issue: 671122 Ontario Ltd. v. Sagaz Industries Canada Inc.
