Lise Jasmin appreciates the flexibility of her job as a community health nurse in Ottawa, but the combination of home and office work as well as varied scheduling makes it difficult to completely disconnect when she is out of the clock.
There is little clarity about what to do, for example, if a co-worker working later has a question or is expected to answer if someone sends her an email at 10 p.m.
Jasmin is looking forward to seeing how her new workplace dismissal policy – now required by law this month for all Ontario employers with 25 or more employees – will address these gray areas.
“Sometimes there is a lot of turbid water,” Jasmin said.  “We hope the implementation of the policy will clear up some of them.”
Affected employers should have written policies by June 2nd.  They have another 30 days to provide them to staff, so many employees like Jasmin are still waiting to see how they live up to their expectations.
The new law has created a buzz about its ability to give people the peace of mind of being tuned in to digital communications at the end of the business day.  However, experts and stakeholders say that it is very vague to really strike a balance between work and personal life, especially in the age of hybrid work.
Toronto employment lawyer Deborah Hudson said it was important to address issues of work-life balance as hybrid work became a permanent feature of many workers’ lives two years after the pandemic that overturned traditional rules.
However, he said Ontario law missed an opportunity to have a real impact because it did not specify what employer policies should contain.
“I think the spirit and the idea are fantastic.  “Just what does that really mean?”  said Hudson.
Business owners had the same question before the June 2 deadline.
The Canadian Independent Business Federation conducted a survey that found that 33 percent of small businesses with 25 or more employees said they did not know they had to pursue a disconnection policy by then.  Only 16 percent of businesses said they had implemented a policy within the deadline.
Julie Kwiecinski, CFIB’s director of provincial affairs, said she had heard from many confused companies that they wanted to obey the law, but did not receive clear guidance on how to do so.
“It’s a bit of a double-edged sword, because on the one hand, you like flexibility because you have not backed down,” he said.
“But on the other hand, it puts a business in a really precarious position, because then they wonder, what should you put into this policy that will be negotiated with an Employment Standards officer, if they come in the door and ask to see it?”
The Ministry of Labor said it had no information on how many eligible employers had prepared policies because they were not required to submit them.
Employers who fail to define a policy could be fined, but the ministry is taking a “first approach to education”.
The ministry said it has shared policy information via email, newsletters and on the government website and is planning more training webinars.
Monte McNaughton, who introduced the legislation as Labor Secretary, said in an interview that introducing a policy is in the employer’s best interest.
“If you want to attract and retain talent – because that’s a big challenge here in Ontario – you have to step up and have those policies and recognize that when people are done at the end of the day, they have to be off the clock and “They spend time with their families,” he said.
The law on employment standards – and therefore the requirement of political disengagement – does not apply to Crown employees, the ministry said.  But McNaughton said knowing more about the issue has made a difference in his own office.
“Once we introduced the legislation, I noticed a big difference,” he said.  “People, including me, did not send this email late at night or on weekends and kept it for Monday morning.”
McNaughton said he wanted to see the impact of the law and that if “further action” was needed, the government would act.  He will continue to amend labor laws, especially to keep pace with technological change, he said.
John Gross, who owns a climbing gym in Toronto, said it was not difficult to come up with a policy and the process helped streamline operations by forcing us to look carefully at areas where younger recruits were calling senior officers off-shift for help.
“Implementing this policy leads to a little more education to make them a little more self-sufficient, so that they do not have to call people for everyday things,” he said.  “It helped us realize where we need to improve our process a little bit.”
Other experts have pointed out what they see as disadvantages of the law.  David Doorey, a professor of labor law at York University, said the government’s description of the policy as a “right of disconnection” was misleading because the law did not create new rights for people.
He noted that there are no consequences if employers ignore their own disconnection policies.  It also does not protect employees from discipline if they ignore communications outside of 24 hours, which, he said, makes the law in its current form “basically useless”.
“The best we can say about the law is that it can force some employers to change the way they think about after-hours communications, and that could be helpful to some employees,” Doorey said.
Jim Stanford, an economist and director of the Center for Future Jobs in Vancouver, said marketing it as a “disengagement right” could be detrimental to workers and that joining a union would do more to protect people.
Digital technology is part of the ambiguity of work and life, Stanford said, along with the “over-competitive” and precarious nature of many jobs, where there is “tacit pressure” to work overtime to maintain contracts or get promoted.
“In the absence of clear guidelines and clear protection for employees, this abuse of employee availability will worsen,” Stanford said.
– With files from Allison Jones