I keep hearing that Ontario has paid sick days now. Seven Working for Workers bills, all that branding, the government talking about protecting workers at every press conference and I get why people think it happened. It didn’t.
Here is what the Employment Standards Act actually says: if you work in Ontario and you’ve been at your job for at least two weeks, you get three days of sick leave per calendar year. Unpaid. No money. Your job is protected, your rent still comes due, and your employer doesn’t owe you a dollar for the time you missed.
Three days. That’s the floor. Not three paid days with the option for more, just three unpaid days which is the same number you might burn through with a bad flu and a follow-up appointment. If your employer offers paid sick leave that’s their policy or your union’s contract, not provincial law. And roughly 36% of Canadian workers don’t have any employer-provided paid sick leave at all, from what I can tell the number is worse in Ontario’s service sector where jobs are more precarious and coverage thinner.
How We Got Here
I’d take this back to 2017 if you’ll let me, because that’s when things actually changed and then promptly unchanged.
The Wynne Liberals passed Bill 148, the Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act, which gave Ontario workers two paid Personal Emergency Leave days and eight unpaid PEL days per year. It also bumped minimum wage to $14.00 with $15.00 scheduled for January 2019. For a brief window Ontario had legislated paid time off when you got sick. Not generous by international standards, but it existed.
Context: Personal Emergency Leave under the old rules covered illness, injury, and urgent family matters. The two paid days were the first legislated paid sick leave Ontario workers had at provincial level. Before Bill 148 employers had no obligation to pay for any sick time.
Then Doug Ford won the 2018 election and one of his first moves was Bill 47, the Making Ontario Open for Business Act. It killed the two paid sick days, froze minimum wage at $14.00, and replaced the 10 PEL days with three unpaid sick days, three unpaid family responsibility days, and two unpaid bereavement days. The paid component: gone.
Look, I get that business groups had concerns about Bill 148’s costs. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business was loud about it. But the speed of reversal was something else, they didn’t tweak the program or phase it differently, they zeroed it out. Eight months from law to repeal.
The COVID Detour
The pandemic forced a correction. Sort of.
In April 2021 the government passed Bill 284, the COVID-19 Putting Workers First Act, which created the Worker Income Protection Benefit: three paid infectious disease emergency leave days, up to $200 per day. Employers paid workers directly and got reimbursed through the WSIB. Temporary, of course. Extended to December 2021 because of Delta. Extended again to July 2022. The program finally closed on March 31, 2023.
That was it for paid sick leave in Ontario.
During this exact same period the NDP introduced paid sick days legislation roughly every few months. Bill 8, the Stay Home If You Are Sick Act, would have created 10 permanent paid days plus 14 during public health emergencies. The PCs voted it down. The NDP tried again. Voted down again. By the end of the 43rd Parliament the government had voted against paid sick days more than 28 times.
Not a typo. Twenty-eight times.
What the Working for Workers Series Actually Changed
I’ll give the government some credit here. The seven Working for Workers bills have done real things for Ontario employees: sick note bans, AED requirements on construction sites, right-to-disconnect policies, penalties for employers who require Canadian experience in job postings. Bill 190 (Working for Workers Five, 2024) banned employers from demanding a doctor’s note for ESA sick leave which is a genuine improvement because those notes cost workers money and clog up family doctor offices which are already overloaded.
Bill 229 (Working for Workers Six, 2024) added long-term illness leave, up to 27 weeks unpaid for serious medical conditions, effective June 19, 2025. Good protection for people facing cancer treatment or major surgery.
But again. Unpaid.
The brand works, that’s the thing. “Working for Workers” shows up in press releases, in question period, in campaign ads, and if you don’t look at what’s actually covered you’d think Ontario has one of the strongest labour protection regimes in the country. My read on this is that the government figured out you can get credit for sounding pro-worker without spending the money that pro-worker policy actually costs.
Legislated Paid Sick Days by Jurisdiction
Where the Parties Stand
The NDP position has been consistent since before Marit Stiles took leadership: 10 permanent paid sick days for all workers, plus 14 during public health emergencies. They’ve introduced versions of this bill in three consecutive parliaments. Every time it comes to vote the PCs block it.
John Fraser, the interim Liberal leader, reintroduced the 10 Paid Sick Days for Ontario Workers Act, calling paid sick leave something that needs to be “back on the table.” The Liberals had it on table in 2017. Bill 148 was their law. And then they lost the election and it disappeared.
The PCs? Their position is that the Working for Workers series is sufficient. Seven bills, zero paid sick days in any of them.
The Numbers Behind the Gap
Here is where this gets real. Statistics Canada data from 2023 shows 64% of Canadian employees have access to paid sick leave through their employer. That figure has been trending upward since 2021, partly because the pandemic made companies rethink their policies and partly because Ottawa mandated three paid sick days for federally regulated workers.
But 64% is an average, and averages lie. For temporary workers it drops to about 40%. For workers in accommodation and food services, retail, the number is lower still. These are the people who show up sick to work because they can’t afford not to. Same people who handled your coffee this morning.
Context: British Columbia became the first province to mandate paid sick days in 2022, at five per year. The federal Canada Labour Code provides 10 sick days, three of them paid, for federally regulated workers. Ontario and most other provinces still have zero legislated paid sick days.
And we’ve been through a pandemic. If there’s one thing COVID made obvious it’s that sending sick workers into workplaces because they can’t afford to stay home is a public health problem, not a personal one. Ontario’s own government created a temporary paid sick leave program because even they saw this during the emergency. Then the emergency ended, or the politics around it shifted, and the program expired.
What Three Unpaid Days Actually Means
Think about what happens when a food service worker earning $17.60 an hour gets the flu. Three unpaid days costs them roughly $420 in lost wages. That’s a week of groceries for a family. That’s bus fare for a month. Most of these workers don’t have savings to cover it because the wage doesn’t leave room for savings.
So they go to work sick. They serve food sick, they stock shelves sick, they drive buses sick. The cost gets transferred from the employer to the public, in doctor visits, in longer illness for customers and coworkers, in less productivity across the board. I’d argue the province pays for this either way, they just chose the version that doesn’t show up on an employer’s balance sheet.
28 votes and counting. The Workers’ Action Centre keeps pushing, the NDP keeps introducing bills, the Liberals keep promising to bring it back. And the law in Ontario still says three days, unpaid, full stop.
Sources and verification: Ontario ESA sick leave rules (3 unpaid days, 2-week minimum employment) confirmed via ontario.ca/document/your-guide-employment-standards-act-0/sick-leave. Bill 47’s repeal of Bill 148 paid sick days verified through ola.org legislative records and Canadian HR Reporter coverage. The Worker Income Protection Benefit ($200/day cap, three days, WSIB reimbursement) confirmed via ontario.ca/page/covid-19-worker-income-protection-benefit. The WIPB’s March 31, 2023 closure date from Benefits Canada reporting. The 28+ votes against paid sick days from insauga.com and Daily Hive coverage of PC voting record. Bill 190 sick note ban (effective October 28, 2024) from Blakes legal analysis. Bill 229 long-term illness leave (27 weeks, effective June 19, 2025) from Dentons and Fasken employment law updates. Statistics Canada 64% paid sick leave coverage from “Sick leave entitlement, 2023” (catalogue 14-28-0001). NDP and Liberal party positions from ontariondp.ca and ontarioliberal.ca respectively. BC’s five legislated paid sick days from BC Employment Standards Act amendments effective January 1, 2022. Federal three paid sick days from Canada Labour Code amendments effective December 2022.
Look up how your MPP voted on sick leave legislation at Ontario Pulse.