There is no law in Canada that says you must have an employee handbook. That surprises people, and it leads a lot of small employers to conclude that written policies are a nice-to-have they will get to eventually. The conclusion is wrong, and the reason is worth understanding: the obligation does not attach to the handbook, it attaches to specific named policies. A handbook is just the binder most employers keep them in. You can have no handbook at all and still be fully compliant, and you can have a beautiful fifty-page handbook and still be missing the two policies an inspector would actually ask for.
This is a plain-language guide to which policies are genuinely mandatory, where the thresholds sit, and what you need to be able to prove beyond the document existing.
First, work out which rulebook applies to you
Roughly ninety percent of Canadian employees fall under provincial or territorial employment law. The remaining ten percent work in federally regulated industries such as banking, telecommunications, interprovincial transport, air travel, and broadcasting, and are covered by the Canada Labour Code instead. The lists below differ between the two, so this is the first question, not a footnote. It also matters that the test is where the employee actually works, not where your head office sits, which is why a company with staff in three provinces is working from three lists at once.
The policies most employers actually owe
Harassment and violence prevention
This is the one obligation that shows up almost everywhere in some form, and it is the one small employers most often miss. In Ontario, occupational health and safety law requires written workplace violence and workplace harassment policies, together with programs to implement them, and they must be reviewed at least annually. In Quebec, labour standards law requires every employer to have a psychological harassment prevention and complaint processing policy, in writing and made available to employees, and recent amendments added required elements it must contain. British Columbia requires a bullying and harassment policy statement under its occupational health and safety regime. Federally regulated employers have their own harassment and violence prevention framework with a required policy, a workplace assessment, and mandatory training.
The details differ by jurisdiction, but the direction is consistent enough to plan around: if you employ people in Canada, assume you owe a written harassment policy somewhere, and confirm the specific form for each province you operate in.
Ontario-specific policies keyed to employee count
Ontario has added two written-policy obligations that catch employers as they grow, and both are counted at a fixed point in the year rather than continuously. Employers with 25 or more employees must have a written policy on disconnecting from work, and a written policy on electronic monitoring that states whether the employer monitors employees and, if so, how and for what purpose. Crossing the threshold obliges you to produce the policy and to distribute copies to employees within set timelines. The count is a snapshot on January 1, which means a company that grows past 25 during a year knows well in advance that it has an obligation coming.
Accessibility, in Ontario
Under Ontario accessibility legislation, organizations must have accessibility policies, and larger organizations must put them in writing, make them publicly available, and maintain a multi-year accessibility plan. Small organizations have lighter documentation obligations than large ones, so this is another place where checking your own size against the current threshold matters more than copying what a bigger company does.
Policies that are not required but effectively expected
A second group is not legislated but shows up whenever something goes wrong, because their absence weakens your position. Progressive discipline, attendance and time-off request procedures, acceptable technology use, confidentiality, expense rules, and a code of conduct all fall here. No inspector will fine you for lacking them. An adjudicator asked to decide whether a dismissal was handled fairly, or whether an employee understood the standard they were held to, will absolutely notice that nothing was ever written down.
Having the policy is only half of it
This is where most of the real exposure sits, and it is a records problem rather than a drafting problem. For the mandatory policies, you are generally expected to be able to show more than a file on a shared drive:
- That the policy exists in writing, in a version you can produce with a date on it.
- That employees actually received it, and when, which usually means an acknowledgement rather than an assumption.
- That new hires receive it as part of onboarding rather than at some unspecified later point.
- That it has been reviewed on the required cadence, annually for several of the harassment obligations.
- That where training is required, the training happened and you can name who took it and when.
- That when the policy changed, employees were told, and you can show which version was in force on a given date.
The common failure is not a missing policy. It is a policy that exists, was emailed to everyone in 2023, and has no acknowledgement record, no review date, and no evidence that the six people hired since then ever saw it. On paper you are compliant. In practice you cannot demonstrate any of it, which in a dispute is close to the same thing as not having done it.
A practical order to work in
- List every province and jurisdiction where you actually have employees, including federal if it applies.
- For each one, confirm the harassment and violence policy requirement and whether yours meets its current required elements.
- Check your employee count against every size threshold that applies to you, and diarize the date the count is taken.
- For each mandatory policy, find the distribution and acknowledgement evidence. If it does not exist, that is your first gap, ahead of writing anything new.
- Put the annual review dates in a calendar rather than trusting that someone will remember.
- Fold policy delivery and acknowledgement into onboarding so new hires stop being the weak point.
This is general information, not legal advice, and the thresholds and required contents in this area change more often than most of employment law. Confirm the current requirements for each jurisdiction you operate in against the responsible ministry or commission, and take advice from an employment lawyer before relying on any of it for a specific decision.
Where Workleaf fits, and where it does not
We will be exact about this, because the honest answer is narrower than what an HR software vendor would like to claim. Workleaf does not write your policies and does not tell you which ones you owe. What it holds is the evidence layer underneath them. Every employee is attached to a location carrying a province, including a federal designation, so you can see at a glance which jurisdictions you are actually operating in and how many people sit in each, which is the input to every threshold above. Documents attach to the employee record with categories and an optional expiry date, so a signed acknowledgement lives on the person it belongs to rather than in a mailbox. Onboarding templates let policy delivery be a repeatable checklist item on every new hire instead of a thing someone remembers. And the organization-scoped audit log records who changed what and when, so the history of an HR record is reconstructable rather than asserted.
What Workleaf does not have today is a dedicated policy module: versioned policy documents with per-employee acknowledgement tracking and automatic annual review reminders are on our roadmap, not shipped. You can attach a policy and its signed acknowledgement to an employee record right now, and that covers the evidence question, but we are not going to describe it as a policy management system when it is document storage doing an honest job. If that distinction matters to your procurement, ask us and we will tell you exactly where it stands.
Pricing is simple and public. Basic is $15 CAD per month for up to 10 employees, then $1.50 CAD per additional employee. Advanced is $30 CAD per month for up to 10 employees, then $3 CAD per additional employee. No quotes, no surprises.