Company couldn't point to formal termination that would legally reset clock
A regulator's small math mistake almost cost a longtime tradesman thousands of dollars in vacation pay, until an Ontario labour board stepped in, recalculated the numbers, and handed his employer a much bigger bill.
Ontario Labour Relations Board Vice-Chair Allan Kaufman ruled on the case on Sept, 17, 2026, siding with a longtime employee who had spent roughly 12 years working for a small Ontario siding company. The board found he was owed a lot more vacation pay than a government employment standards officer had worked out.
He'd been on the payroll at Graham Siding Inc. o/a Graham Siding since 2012, right up until he was laid off on Nov. 29, 2024. His claim for unpaid vacation pay didn't land with the province's Director of Employment Standards until April 2025, and that delay meant the law only let him chase vacation pay going back to April 15, 2023.
Back on May 5, 2026, the employment standards officer had used a four percent rate to work out the vacation pay and ordered Graham Siding to pay just under $500 to cover the shortfall. The worker appealed , pointing to an email in which the officer said she had made "a percentage error," though she added she had no power to reopen the file herself.
Continuous employment?
At a hearing on Sept. 16, 2026, the worker represented himself and said he'd worked for the company non-stop since 2012. He showed up almost 30 minutes late, having forgotten the hearing entirely until a board mediator phoned him, and he hadn't brought the bank records he'd filed with the board earlier. His account of exactly how the officer miscounted his pay was pretty thin, so the board left her wage numbers alone.
The company's owner told a different story. He said he'd hired the worker around 2012 and had deducted income tax from his pay the whole time, but argued the employment hadn't been continuous, saying it had been broken up by layoffs here and there over the years.
He also said the worker's job hadn't technically ended on Nov. 29, 2024 at all. According to him, the worker had simply been laid off and then chose not to come back when recalled, because he'd already found other work by then. In the owner's view, that made it a resignation, not a firing.
Six per cent vacation pay
Both sides agreed those 12 or so years included some stretches of layoffs. When Vice-Chair Kaufman asked the owner point-blank whether those layoffs had broken the worker's run of continuous employment, the owner's answer was simply "yes." But the company couldn't point to any formal termination that would have legally reset the clock at any point before Nov. 29, 2024, and the board couldn't find one either.
That mattered a lot, because Ontario's rules set vacation pay at four percent of wages for anyone with under five years on the job, jumping to six percent once someone passes that five-year mark. The officer's earlier decision had pegged the worker at 12 straight years with the company, and nothing at the hearing changed that, so the board decided six percent should have applied from the start.
Redoing the math at six percent instead of four, the board put the worker's total vacation pay at $2,042.39. Some of that had already made its way to the Director of Employment Standards; the rest, a balance of $1,582.78, is now owed by the company, on top of a 10 percent administrative fee of $158.27 payable to the director's office.
The board also pointed out that the worker never asked for termination pay, and said the evidence was too murky to say whether he'd quit by skipping the recall or lost the job some other way.
