Can Employers Require Employees to Be Vaccinated in Canada?

No statute settles this either way

Usually yes, subject to human rights accommodation. Neither Ontario nor Alberta has a law that directly authorizes or bans an employer’s vaccination policy. In Ontario, the Employment Standards Act policy manual confirms that the ESA “does not prohibit employers from terminating employees for failing to get vaccinated against and/or tested for COVID-19.” Ontario’s government guidance goes further, stating plainly that neither the Occupational Health and Safety Act nor the ESA directly addresses vaccination or the enforcement of employer vaccination policies. In other words, the legality of a mandate is not decided by employment standards law at all. It rests on two other bodies of law: the common-law and arbitral test for reasonableness of unilaterally imposed workplace rules, and human rights legislation’s duty to accommodate.

The test that actually decides it: reasonableness

Where an employer imposes a new rule the employment contract didn’t already contain, such as a vaccination requirement, courts and arbitrators ask whether the rule is reasonable. In a unionized Ontario workplace, an arbitrator applying this test to a mandatory vaccination policy, including placing non-compliant employees on unpaid leave, concluded that the policy was a reasonable exercise of management rights while it remained in force. Alberta courts apply the same idea outside unionized settings: for a policy to be enforceable against an employee, it must be reasonable, unambiguous, well published, and consistently enforced, with the employee having known or reasonably ought to have known of the policy and its consequences. Applying that standard, Alberta courts have found mandatory vaccination policies to be reasonable and legally enforceable in constructive dismissal cases.

Federally regulated employers run on a separate track

Employees of banks, telecommunications companies, and interprovincial transportation fall under federal rather than provincial law regardless of which province they work in. The Canadian Human Rights Act applies only to federally regulated workers, while the Alberta Human Rights Act covers everyone else in that province. Ontario’s non-federal workforce is covered by its own Human Rights Code instead. Federally regulated employers have grounded their vaccination policies in the general occupational health and safety duty under Part II of the Canada Labour Code to take reasonable precautions to protect workers. Some federal mandates were narrower than the employer’s own policy: the regulation for federally regulated transportation workers applied only to employees physically accessing regulated worksites, such as aerodrome property, and would not have reached an employee working from home.

The federal government also mandated vaccination directly as a condition of employment. As of October 2021, a policy applied to roughly 268,000 federal public servants in the Core Public Administration, including RCMP members. That mandate was not permanent: it was suspended as of June 20, 2022, ending vaccination as a condition of employment for those workers.

Where the mandate can flip on accommodation

A reasonable policy still has to bend for a protected human rights ground. Under the Canadian Human Rights Act, once an employee’s need connects to a protected ground, the employer must accommodate short of undue hardship, a legal test assessed with regard to health, safety, and cost. In Alberta, employers have implemented mandatory policies with built-in medical and religious exemption processes, and human rights adjudicators treat such a policy as a valid starting point that is nonetheless subject to the duty to accommodate. Not every stated objection qualifies. Alberta’s leading authority for assessing whether a religious objection is genuine is Pelletier v 1226309 Alberta Ltd, which sets an objective test for whether the belief is sincerely held rather than simply asserted. In Ontario, an employee terminated over a creed-based refusal may still have a remedy through the Human Rights Code, even though the ESA itself does not prohibit the termination.

Some sectors face a government-imposed mandate, not just an employer choice

In certain high-risk settings, the decision was taken out of the employer’s hands. A directive from Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health required all Ontario hospitals to establish, implement, and ensure compliance with a vaccination policy, with built-in medical-exemption and education-session alternatives. More broadly, Ontario required organizations in public hospitals, home and community care, and ambulance services to have vaccination policies covering staff, contractors, and volunteers. In these settings the legal question shifts from “was the employer’s policy reasonable” to “did the organization comply with the government directive.”

What you can do next

• Unionized employees can grieve a vaccination policy or a resulting suspension or termination through the collective agreement’s grievance and arbitration process, where an arbitrator will apply the reasonableness test described above.
• Non-unionized employees in Ontario who believe a termination or refusal to accommodate involved a protected ground can bring a claim to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.
• Non-unionized employees in Alberta have the equivalent option through the Alberta Human Rights Commission, which applies the Pelletier test to creed-based objections.
• Federally regulated employees raise accommodation disputes under the Canadian Human Rights Act rather than a provincial statute.