A certain type of language is used by businesses when they fire people. In business news, words like “restructuring,” “workforce optimization,” and “right-sizing” are used so often that they almost don’t mean anything anymore. But something more real is going on behind those carefully written press releases. And Ontario’s employment records are starting to tell that story more honestly than any CEO memo ever could.
Layoffs have been steadily going up across the province. Some are easy to see, like the planned cuts at Invista that made politicians and people in the Kingston community worried. Others are less public because they are buried in regulatory paperwork or announced in internal emails that never make it to the business section. Anyone can see that real people are leaving offices and factories without fully understanding what the law says they should be paid.
People often miss that part. The Employment Standards Act of Ontario does set minimum requirements for severance pay and notice of termination. The Act is only the floor, though. Common law, which is made up of decades of court decisions, often gives you a lot more. Recent decisions have kept raising that ceiling, taking into account things like an employee’s age, length of service, the availability of similar work, and the nature of the job itself. If a manager in their late fifties has been fired without a good reason, they may be entitled to a lot more than what a quick check on the company’s HR portal would show.
Multinational employers are one detail that many workers don’t expect. Ontario courts have said that a company’s global payroll numbers are taken into account when figuring out if it pays enough in severance pay (2.5 million dollars). So even if the local office only has thirty people, the worldwide headcount and revenue of the parent company can make employees eligible in ways they didn’t know were possible. This is the kind of rule that everyone should know, but most people don’t.
It’s possible that the wave of people going back to work has added another layer to this. Starting in early 2026, companies like PNC Financial, Ubisoft, and Home Depot pushed workers back five days a week. Some workers refused or couldn’t comply and ended up in a tough legal situation. In some situations, changing someone’s working conditions without their permission can be the same as firing them. This includes making a big change to where they have to work. That means some workers who “resigned” because of an RTO rule might have had a valid severance claim.
Another group that is ignored is seasonal workers. A lot of people think that breaks between seasonal jobs erase work history. That’s not always how Ontario law sees it. When there are seasonal breaks, employment doesn’t automatically end. This means that years of work can be added up to reach the five-year mark needed for statutory severance. People who have worked for the same company summer after summer may be closer to being eligible than they thought.
The speed is what makes all of this feel important right now. Oracle is said to be planning tens of thousands more cuts around the world. BCE is being sued by dozens of former employees for wrongful termination. There are layoffs happening in manufacturing, telecom, and tech all at the same time. The range is so big that employment lawyers have started to update their public advice every month instead of once a year.
People here feel like the lack of information is really costing them money. Many people sign a severance package without first talking to a lawyer. They do this because they’re stressed, sad about losing their job, or afraid of looking difficult. However, this can mean giving up months of extra pay. A lot of the time, the documents are written to look like they are final, but they aren’t. There is no plot there. Because that’s how talks work when one side knows the rules better than the other.
Layoffs in Ontario might not be on the front page of every newspaper every morning. But the lawsuits, filings, and private calls to employment lawyers show that it’s a lot bigger than what the press releases say.
