The meeting is almost always short. Twelve minutes, maybe fifteen. A calendar invite appears an hour before, sometimes ten minutes before, with a vague title, "quick chat," "touch base," "HR sync." The person on the other end of the Zoom has a document shared to their screen already, and they are reading from it, because the words are legally important and no one wants to freelance. Your role reports to have changed. Effective today. Your access will be cut at the end of the call. We are offering you a package. Here is a PDF. You have ten days to sign.
I watched a lot of these calls in 2023 and 2024. Not as the person in the meeting. As the person downstream, rebuilding the HR system after the company that let those employees go realized that the way they had handled it was going to cost them a lot more than they thought. And as someone who had friends, old colleagues, people whose work I respected, show up on LinkedIn with the green "open to work" banner on a Tuesday morning that had not been a Tuesday morning of that kind the week before.
The tech layoff wave that ran from late 2022 through the end of 2024 was the largest coordinated reduction in Canadian white-collar employment in a generation. Shopify, Bell Media, Rogers, banks, the long tail of Series A and B startups that ran out of runway, and in December of 2024 a fully staffed accounting software company that told its entire workforce by email on a Sunday afternoon that they did not need to come in on Monday. In most of those cases, the package handed to the departing employee on termination day was the statutory minimum under their province's Employment Standards Act. And in most of those cases, the employee signed it.
This post is about what was on the other side of that signature.
The number on the PDF is a floor
Every Canadian province has an Employment Standards Act that sets a minimum amount of notice (or pay in lieu of notice) an employer must give when terminating an employee without cause. Two weeks after a year of service. Three weeks after three years. Eight weeks at a five or eight-year cap, depending on the jurisdiction. The severance pay calculator on this site computes those numbers exactly, they are not complicated, and they are usually not generous.
The statutory number is the floor. It is the minimum an employer must pay to avoid breaking the law. Almost no one, not a lawyer, regulator, former HR director I have spoken to, believes it is what the employee is actually owed in most terminations.
What the employee is actually owed, in most terminations, is common-law reasonable notice under the Supreme Court's 1960 decision in Bardal v. Globe & Mail. The Bardal factors are four things: the employee's age, their length of service, the character of the employment (senior, specialized, hard to replace), and the availability of similar employment in the current labour market. A court weighing those factors will arrive at a number that is almost always longer than the statutory minimum, and in senior or long-tenured cases it is longer by an order of magnitude.
A concrete example. A 54-year-old senior software engineer in Ontario with twelve years of tenure, terminated in a soft tech market. The Ontario ESA entitles them to eight weeks of notice plus twelve weeks of s.64 severance, so twenty weeks. A court applying Bardal would typically land at fifteen to eighteen months of reasonable notice. Sixty to seventy weeks. The employer's package: twenty weeks. The worker's real entitlement: three to four times that.
Most workers never see the larger number. The package arrives with a release attached. The release, once signed, eliminates the common-law claim. The employee accepts the statutory floor. And the employer is relieved to pay it, because they knew the floor was not the ceiling the whole time.
The ten-day window is not a coincidence
The typical package includes a signature deadline. "Please sign and return within ten days." Sometimes seven. Sometimes fourteen. It is always short enough that an employee who wants to consult an employment lawyer has to do it in a hurry, and usually short enough that an employee without legal savings cannot afford to at all.
The deadline is there by design. The best time for an employer to settle a termination is before the terminated employee has had the Bardal conversation with a lawyer. Once that conversation has happened, the negotiation starts at a different number.
If you are the person holding that package: the deadline is not a legal requirement. It is a contract term proposed by the employer. Nothing stops you from calling an employment lawyer, asking for a free consultation (most give them), and finding out what the Bardal range actually is for someone with your age, tenure, role, and market. If the answer is meaningfully higher than the package, a letter from the lawyer almost always produces a revised offer, without anyone going to court.
If you are the founder or HR lead handing that package over: you already know this. Do not pretend the deadline is a legal one. Do not suggest the employee would be "unreasonable" to consult counsel. Budget for the fact that the fair number is usually higher than the statutory one, and the good employers handle that conversation up front rather than after a lawyer's letter arrives.