Alberta

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Special thanks to our articling student Rana Aly for contributing to this update.

Employers monitoring their employees in the workplace should be cognizant of their obligations under employment and data privacy laws. This article provides a primer on legal requirements for employee monitoring in Canada and contrasts employer compliance requirements in the provinces of Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, and Nova Scotia.

Employers must balance operational needs, such as safety, security, and productivity, with any privacy rights of their employees. Generally, monitoring should be reasonable, proportionate, and tied to a legitimate business purpose. Organizations must comply with applicable federal or provincial privacy laws, which can include safeguarding any employee personal information collected, obtaining employee consent in certain circumstances, and providing notice to employees of monitoring practices.

PIPEDA and Employee Monitoring

For federally regulated private-sector employers—such as banks, airlines, and telecommunications companies— employee monitoring is generally governed by the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). PIPEDA only applies to employee personal information in federally regulated workplaces; otherwise, it governs commercial and customer personal information across Canada.

Provinces that have enacted private‑sector privacy legislation deemed “substantially similar” to PIPEDA are exempt from PIPEDA’s collection, use, and disclosure provisions under section 26(2)(b). Presently, only British Columbia, Alberta, and Québec have privacy legislation that is substantially similar to PIPEDA.

In provinces which do not have substantially similar private‑sector privacy legislation, such as Ontario and Nova Scotia, PIPEDA does not apply to provincially regulated employers’ handling of employee personal information. In those provinces, employee privacy protections arise through a more fragmented framework that may include employment standards legislation, privacy torts under the common law, employment contracts, workplace policies, and collective agreements. While PIPEDA does not govern employee personal information for provincially regulated employers in such provinces, it continues to apply to commercial or customer personal information across all private‑sector organizations engaged in commercial activities.Continue Reading Employee Monitoring in Canada: What Employers Need to Know

What Canadian Employers Need to Know to Ring in 2024

In 2023, we helped Canadian employers overcome a host of new challenges across the employment law landscape. Many companies started the year with difficult cost-cutting decisions and hybrid work challenges. We’ve worked hard to keep our clients ahead of the curve on these issues, as well…

Overtime class actions are in the headlines again. On February 22, 2019, a class action claim seeking damages of over $100 million was filed against Flight Centre, an Australia-based travel services provider with stores in Canada and internationally. The claim alleges that Flight Centre systematically failed to pay overtime to its retail sales employees, referred to as “travel consultants”, requiring them to consistently work more than their scheduled hours, and implemented policies that fail to comply with the overtime entitlements under employment standards legislation.
Continue Reading Back in Class: Overtime Pay Class Action Brought Against Global Travel Retailer

This is the final article in our three-part series on recent changes to Alberta’s labour and employment legislation. Here we outline changes to Alberta’s occupational health and safety (“OHS”) and workers’ compensation legislation resulting from Bill 30: An Act to Protect the Health and Well-being of Working Albertans.
Continue Reading Alberta Strengthens Workplace Safety Legislation

A recent decision of the Alberta Court of Appeal adds further confusion to the issue of the enforceability of termination clauses. In Holm v AGAT Laboratories Ltd, 2018 ABCA 23 (“Holm“), the Alberta Court of Appeal (“Court”) held that explicit language must be included in a termination clause to oust an employee’s common law rights.
Continue Reading Alberta and Ontario Courts Diverge on Termination Clauses