Right to disconnect policy in Ontario: a policy, not a right

What does Ontario's right to disconnect policy require?

Employers that employ 25 or more employees in Ontario on January 1 of a year must have a written policy on disconnecting from work in place before March 1 of that year. The requirement was added to the ESA on December 2, 2021, and applies to employers and employees covered by the ESA, except the Crown, Crown agencies and certain boards, commissions and corporations whose members are all appointed by the Crown, and their employees.

The ESA defines disconnecting from work as not engaging in work-related communications, including emails, telephone calls, video calls or sending or reviewing other messages, to be free from the performance of work. The 25-employee count is of people, not full-time equivalents: part-time and casual employees each count as one. An employer with fewer than 25 employees on January 1 is not required to have a policy that year, even if it hires more later.

The policy must apply to all of the employer's employees in Ontario, management and executives included where they are employees under the ESA, although it may set different rules for different groups. It must carry the date it was prepared and the date of any change. Employees receive a copy within 30 calendar days of the policy being prepared or changed, and new hires within 30 days of being hired. The employer keeps a copy of each policy for three years after it is no longer in effect.

Does Ontario's law create a right to disconnect?

No, not through the policy requirement. The government of Ontario's guide to the ESA states that the ESA does not require an employer to create a new right for employees to disconnect from work, and that the rights employees have not to perform work come from other ESA rules: hours of work and eating periods, vacation with pay, public holidays, and the rules in Ontario Regulation 285/01 on when work is deemed to be performed.

Those rules are specific. Most employees can be required to work eight hours a day, or the hours of an established regular workday if longer, and 48 hours a week, and either limit can be exceeded only by an electronic or written agreement. In most cases an employee must receive at least 11 consecutive hours off work each day, at least eight hours between shifts (with exceptions), and at least 24 consecutive hours off each work week or 48 in every two consecutive work weeks. The 11-hour daily rest applies even where the employee has agreed to exceed the daily or weekly limit.

A policy can go further. If it gives employees a greater right or benefit than an ESA standard, that right may be enforceable under the ESA. If it does not, the guide says the policy is not enforceable under the ESA, although the other ESA rules still apply.

Federally regulated employers follow a different track. The Government of Canada's Forward Regulatory Plan for 2026 to 2028 says that amendments to the Canada Labour Code will, once in force, require federally regulated private-sector employers and federal Crown corporations to issue right to disconnect policies in consultation with employees or their unions.

What can a disconnecting policy say, and what does it leave unchanged?

A policy can state what the employer expects of employees after their shift is over, because the ESA leaves the content to the employer. The guide gives examples: whether employees are expected to read or reply to work emails or answer work calls after the shift, different expectations by time of day, subject matter or who is making contact (a client, a supervisor, a colleague), and requirements to turn on out-of-office notices or change voicemail messages when not scheduled to work.

What a policy cannot do by itself is change how the work is arranged. A line saying nobody is expected to reply after six sits beside a calendar where a decision waits for one approver, a client call lands at a quarter to five and the report is due at nine. Where the real work already advances outside working hours, people are left to choose between the policy and the deadline.

OHA's Five Loads give that pattern a name. Interruptions and context switching fragment the day, and work that needs focus moves to the evening: that is cognitive load. The other four loads, decisional, emotional, relational and administrative, often feed it. Reading the policy tells you the rule; reading the loads tells you the cost of keeping it.

Long hours have an evidence base of their own. A 2021 study by the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimated that working 55 or more hours a week is associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, compared with working 35 to 40 hours. The finding is about hours worked, not after-hours messages, so it does not speak to email as such.

The check below takes about a minute. It uses five of the ten statements in OHA's capacity self-portrait, one for each load.

How do you tell whether the policy matches the week?

Compare what the policy says with where work actually moves: when messages arrive, who sends them and what happens to a late reply. The guide's own examples give you the three cuts to use, time of day, subject matter and sender.

Start with managers, because their calendars shape everyone else's. Ask which messages reach them outside working hours, and from whom. Then look at decisions: how many people approve something one person could do, and whether a settled decision is reopened the following week. Each extra step is a message that can arrive late in the day.

Finally, look at what happens when someone does not reply. If the answer is a follow-up or a visible irritation, the policy is a document, not a practice. The signs that a team is overloaded are a useful companion for this step.

What can HR do beyond writing the policy?

The ESA sets three dates around the policy: it must be in place before March 1, employees receive a copy within 30 calendar days of the policy being prepared or changed, and each new hire receives one within 30 days. Naming one owner for it helps, since a policy that nobody owns is read once.

Where the policy sets expectations, the guide's examples (time of day, subject and sender) can be written in terms a manager can apply without calling HR.

Finally, measure the load behind the rule and repeat the measurement. Pick the load that weighs most, change one thing about the work that causes it, and read the same five loads again in 90 days. Our post on what a capacity diagnostic actually measures explains how that reading is built.