Does an employee’s reasonable notice include years of service with the seller?

People use “reasonable notice” to mean two different things, and the answer is clearer when they are separated. Statutory notice and severance are minimums set by the employment standards law that applies. Anything above those minimums is a separate question that the official guides below do not decide. They do agree on the first kind: selling a business does not reset an employee’s clock.

Ontario: the seller’s time flows through

Ontario’s guide to the Employment Standards Act says the length of employment with the seller is attributed, or “flows through,” to the purchaser who hires the seller’s employee. The employee does not start as new but gets credit for past employment, and that time must be counted toward any right based on length of employment. The guide notes that entitlements such as notice of termination and severance pay vary with length of employment.

British Columbia and Quebec

British Columbia’s Employment Standards Branch says the purchaser must honour the employee’s past service with the seller. If the employee is later terminated, the purchaser is responsible for compensation for length of service, or notice in lieu, calculated from the date the original seller hired the employee. Quebec’s CNESST says that when a company changes owner the staff’s employment relationship is maintained as if no change had occurred, provided the new owner shows the operation continued, and it describes the former and new owner as solidarily liable for amounts owed.

What the guides do not settle

These sources describe the statutory floor, and provinces differ, as the three sources above show. Whether anything more is owed may turn on the employment contract, the structure of the deal or the circumstances of a dismissal, so a buyer pricing a deal should ask what liabilities come with the staff and have an employment lawyer say which notice period to plan for.