Individual Termination: Notice and Pay in Lieu (CLC Part III, s.230)

Since February 1, 2024, a federally regulated employer that terminates an employee without just cause owes graduated written notice, pay in lieu of notice, or a combination of the two. This note covers terminations of up to 49 employees; larger terminations within a short window trigger a separate group-termination process instead (see Group / Mass Termination).

The notice period scales with service, up to a maximum of 8 weeks:

• 2 weeks once the employee has completed 3 consecutive months
• 3 weeks after 3 consecutive years
• and so on, adding a week for each further completed year of service, up to the 8-week maximum

Two things about this entitlement are easy to miss. First, it is separate from and additional to severance pay — notice and severance are two different obligations that both apply, not two ways of describing the same one; see Severance Pay. Second, the employer must also give the employee a written statement of their benefits — vacation, wages, severance, and any other amounts owed — timed to at least 2 weeks before termination if working notice is given, or no later than the termination date itself if the employer pays in lieu.

The federal package as a whole diverges from Ontario’s ESA notice in a structural way, not just in the week-count: it pairs graduated notice with mandatory severance and with unjust-dismissal reinstatement rights that don’t exist under the ESA, so the two regimes aren’t directly comparable even where the notice periods happen to look similar.

This is general information, not legal advice; confirm current requirements at the Canada Labour Code and the federal termination page before relying on them.