Ontario's electronic monitoring policy, and the AI tools that belong in it

Any Ontario employer whose headcount is 25 or more on January 1 must keep a written electronic monitoring policy, and that document has to say whether you monitor staff electronically and, if you do, how, when, and what the information is used for. An AI note-taker that transcribes staff meetings, call software that scores agents, or a tool that records screens to learn a process can each be that kind of monitoring, and each belongs in the policy.

The rule came into the Employment Standards Act through the Working for Workers Act, 2022, and the province publishes a guide to it. This page applies that rule to the AI tools a small business may have switched on recently.

A policy that tells staff what is being watched

The obligation is about transparency and nothing more. The province’s guide says the requirement does not give employees a right not to be monitored and does not create new privacy rights. It asks for a written statement, not a change in what you do.

If you do monitor, the policy needs three things:

1. How the monitoring happens: the tool and what it captures.
2. The circumstances: all day, only in meetings, only on company phones.
3. The purposes: what the information may be used for, such as performance review, security, training or route planning.

It also needs the date the policy was prepared, with day, month and year, and the date of any changes. If you do not monitor at all, the policy has to say that in so many words.

Where an AI tool becomes monitoring

The province treats any monitoring of staff carried out electronically as covered. Its examples are deliberately ordinary: GPS on a delivery vehicle, a sensor that times how fast a cashier scans items, a record of which sites staff browse while on the clock. It also says the policy is not limited to devices the employer issued, or to monitoring that happens at the workplace. A personal laptop used for work at home is covered.

Set that wide definition against the AI features now sold inside ordinary office software, whether the office is in Toronto or Collingwood. These are the tools I would put on the list to check, in my judgment:

• Meeting copilots and note-takers. Microsoft describes Copilot in Teams meetings as a tool that “captures important conversation points” and lets participants learn “who said what”. Once transcription is on, a record of each employee’s words exists that did not exist before.
• Call scoring and transcription in phone systems. If your phone system transcribes calls and rates each agent on tone or script, it is measuring employee work, whatever the vendor calls the feature.
• Productivity and activity analytics. Dashboards that report active time, application use or response times per person.
• Screen or process recording. Tools that record a person doing a task so the steps can be mapped or automated later. Even a short project of this kind captures how an identified employee works.
• AI dashcams and routing. Vehicle cameras that flag driver behaviour sit on top of the GPS example the province already gives.

None of this means the tools are a problem. It means each one needs a line in the policy before somebody on staff discovers it from a meeting summary.

Writing the entry for one tool

Here is how I would write the entry for a meeting copilot in an office in Mississauga that is over the threshold. Adjust every detail to what your settings actually do.

• Statement: we electronically monitor employees.
• How: internal video meetings may be transcribed by the AI assistant built into our meeting software, which produces a written transcript and a summary attributed to each speaker.
• Circumstances: only when the meeting organiser turns transcription on. The organiser tells attendees at the start when it is on. One-to-one calls with HR are never transcribed.
• Purposes: meeting records and action items, training material, and, where relevant, workplace investigations.
• Dates: prepared on a named day, month and year, with a line added for each change.

The last purpose is the one owners hesitate to write. Write it anyway if it is true. Osler’s lawyers make the point that monitoring done for one purpose may turn up information useful for another, and a policy that pretends otherwise reads badly later.

Two 25 employee rules, counted on different days

Check which day each count is taken.

• Electronic monitoring: the count is taken on January 1. Below 25 that day, the policy is not required for that year, even if the count increases later in the same year.
• AI in job postings: for the AI job posting disclosure in Ontario, heads are counted on the date the public posting goes live.

So a seasonal employer in Barrie or Kingston can be inside the job posting rule in June and outside the monitoring rule all year, or the other way round. Check both counts separately.

For the monitoring count, the guide is specific. Count heads, not full-time equivalents: a part-time or casual worker is one person in the count. Add every Ontario location together: the province’s example is three wine shops with 12 employees each, which makes 36 and puts the owner over the line even though no single shop is. Probationary employees, employees on a leave of absence, and employees on lay-off whose employment has not been ended are included. Assignment employees of a temporary help agency count toward the agency’s total, not toward the client’s.

The calendar once you are over the line

• Before March 1 of each year in which you meet the threshold, the policy has to be in place.
• Within 30 calendar days of that date, every employee needs a copy. Every change restarts that clock for the updated version.
• New hires get a copy within 30 calendar days of the day the policy had to be in place or the day they became an employee, whichever is later.
• Assignment employees placed with you get it by whichever deadline is later: within 24 hours of the start of the assignment, or within 30 calendar days of the day you had to have the policy in place.
• Every version is kept for three years after it stops being in effect.

A copy can be printed, emailed as an attachment the employee can print, or posted as a link, provided the employee has a reasonable chance to open it and a printer to use. You do not need to write a new policy every year; you need to keep the one you have true.

One detail shapes the risk. According to the guide, an employee can only complain to the Ministry, and an employment standards officer can only investigate, over a failure to hand out the policy within those time limits. That makes the distribution record the part to get right first.

The AI tool list does double duty

An employer over the threshold has a second question as well, in the other direction: what staff may put into AI tools, not what the tools record about staff. Both start from the same inventory of which tools are switched on, who uses them and what they keep.

A written AI policy for small business staff in Ontario names which tools are approved, and which are specifically not. On this site it is $1,500 to $4,000, with a half day of training on site or remote. The monitoring statement is shorter, and in my judgment it is easier to keep true when it lives in the same document as the use rules, because a new tool then gets added to both at once.

If you are hiring somebody to build automation for you, headcount and monitoring belong in the first conversation. They are among the questions an AI consultant should ask you before quoting, and a consultant who records your staff’s screens to map a process is adding to your monitoring whether or not anyone calls it that.

The short version

Count your Ontario employees on January 1. At 25 or more, list every tool that records, transcribes, scores or tracks staff, including the AI features that came bundled with software you already pay for. Write how, when and why for each, date it, hand it out within 30 calendar days, and keep every version. Then update it the day a new tool is switched on.

This page is not legal advice. Before relying on any of it, read the current province’s guide to the written policy and Osler’s notes on the requirement, or ask an employment lawyer.