My Stay Home If You Are Sick Act creates a made-in-Ontario framework for providing paid sick leave to all Ontario workers, during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
This bill will
- give employees in provincially regulated workplaces the right to 10 annual employer-paid days of personal emergency leave
- provide an additional 14 days of paid leave during an infectious disease emergency
- eliminate the need for doctors’ notes
- implement a financial support program for employers to help employers adapt to any increased costs associated with paid personal emergency leave
Since the beginning of the pandemic, public health experts have been calling for paid sick leave to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Workers without paid sick days are the people we have relied on most during the pandemic. They have cared for our seniors, served us food, cleaned our buildings, and bagged our groceries. But when they get sick, or when their child wakes up with a sore throat, they must make an impossible choice, because staying home to recover or care for their child means giving up their pay. It could mean not being able to make the rent, not being able to pay the bills, not being able to buy groceries.
An estimated 60 per cent of Ontarians do not have permanent paid sick days, and that number is much higher among low-income workers, in sectors like food service, hospitality and retail, and among racialized or immigrant people.
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