BC Employment Standards Update: Paid Sick Leave

Paid Sick Days

After a period of public consultation, the BC government announced on November 24, 2021 that effective January 1, 2022, BC employers will be required to provide 5 days of paid sick leave per year to employees for personal illness or injury.

The paid sick leave entitlement applies to all employees covered by the BC Employment Standards Act (“ESA”) after they have worked for the employer for at least 90 days. Both full-time and part-time employees are eligible for paid sick leave.

The paid sick leave does not apply to:

Employees working in federally regulated sectors (though the Canadian government has announced plans to introduce 10 days of paid sick leave for federally regulated workers)
Self-employed workers or independent contractors
Employees in professions and occupations excluded from the ESA.

Employers may request reasonably sufficient proof of illness or injury. The sick days do not need to be taken consecutively. Employees would need to be paid their regular wages for these days.

Since May 2021, amendments to the ESA provided for temporary COVID-19-related paid sick leave of up to 3 days, with reimbursement by the BC government of up to $200 per day. This temporary COVID-19 paid sick leave will expire December 31, 2021 and will be replaced with the 5 days of paid sick leave for any personal illness or injury, with no government reimbursement.

Note that the 5 paid sick days are in addition to the 3 days of unpaid sick leave that employees are currently entitled to under the ESA.

Be sure to update your existing HR policies to take this paid leave into account.

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Upcoming Statutory Holidays

We have received many questions related to the upcoming statutory holidays, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, falling on a weekend. We covered this in a prior post from 2017 and thought it would be a good time for a reminder to employers.

In BC, for statutory holidays that fall on a weekend, employers have a number of options to handle the statutory holiday for eligible employees:

Option 1: Employees don’t work on the weekend statutory holiday. Employees get paid statutory holiday pay equivalent to an average day’s pay for the weekend statutory holiday. Employees work their regularly scheduled days during the week.
Option 2: Employees get the day off on the weekend statutory holiday and you substitute the weekend statutory holiday with a paid day off on the following Monday. This is the most common scenario.
Option 3: Employees get the day off on the weekend statutory holiday and you substitute the statutory holiday with a paid day off on another day upon employee agreement.
Option 4: Employees work on the weekend statutory holiday. Without an agreed upon substitution, employees who work on a statutory holiday are entitled to 1.5 times their regular wage for the time worked that day up to 12 hours, double time for any hours worked over 12 hours, PLUS an average day’s pay.

Option 1 has you paying out one day more than you normally would for the week. Option 2 would have you paying what you normally would but one of those days is a day off with pay.

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If you have questions about the paid sick leave program, statutory holidays or any other employment standards question for your BC-based business, please contact the Employment Standards Branch.