The Ontario government is releasing a major fiscal and economic update Thursday, but with a new labour-reform bill released last week, it’s aiming to show that a province can do things to attract talent beyond throwing money at it.

The Working for Workers Act joins the Ontario Progressive Conservatives’ efforts to update the province’s consumer-privacy legislation, as well as rules on data governance and the use of AI, to set modern ground rules for a 21st-century economy. 

A 2019 Deloitte report argued that effective government regulation—smart, easy to understand and appropriately flexible without being weak—can be a competitive advantage, and Canada had a lot of ground to make up.

“It really is about addressing the future-work issue, and that’s a big one coming out of the pandemic,” Ontario Labour Minister Monte McNaughton said of the labour bill.

The proposed law includes two measures aimed squarely at the tech sector: a ban on “non-compete agreements” that limit workers’ ability to change jobs within their industries, and a requirement that employers with 25 or more workers have policies on their employees’ “right to disconnect” from their work emails and cellphones during off hours.

The bill doesn’t prescribe what those policies must be. They could even say you aren’t allowed to disconnect. But the law would force employers to spell that out.

“This is just about being transparent,” McNaughton said. “It’s something that a worker, if they were being interviewed, could ask their employer what the right-to-disconnect policy looks like. And it puts the worker in the driver’s seat to determine if they want to take that job, for example.”

A third element in the bill would bar regulated professions and trades from requiring Canadian experience as a condition of credentialing, opening more jobs to immigrants who have trained and worked abroad. Other components would license job recruiters and temp agencies, require business owners to let delivery people serving them use company washrooms, and give the agriculture ministry more power to monitor health standards for temporary farm workers.

The whole bill is 17 pages, and much of it could be replicated anywhere in Canada with equivalent tweaks to legislative language.

“We’re leading the country on this, and it’s all about retaining and attracting talent,” McNaughton said. “It’s a global marketplace to attract talent, especially in the tech sector. And I also think this is a conservative approach, about knocking down barriers.”