About Owed at Work: who writes it and by what rules

Owed at Work is written and kept current by one person: Sergio, its editor, who is not a lawyer, holds no Canadian legal qualification and doesn't practise law. That's exactly why the site is built the way it is. Instead of asking you to trust a credential, it shows the section of the statute behind every figure, the day that figure was last checked, and the data file the whole site is compiled from, so you can check it yourself or hand it to someone who is qualified.

Updated September 6, 2026 · Figures verified against the statutes of each jurisdiction · see all figures and their sources

Who is behind this

There's no firm behind this site, no newsroom and no team. There's one person who reads the statutes, builds the data file, writes the pages and programs the calculators.

You'll see the site use the plural in a few places: "we verify", "our own math". That's the voice of the publication, not a hidden staff. Read it as Owed at Work as a publication. This page is in the singular because that's the truth of it.

What I bring to this isn't legal authority. It's the work: reading an Act in its official version, pulling out the figures it sets, building a system that stores each one with its section and its date, and writing tools that do the math people get wrong by hand. What I don't do is advise you on your situation.

The part that has to be said plainly

I'm not a lawyer, a paralegal or an employment standards officer. I hold no Canadian legal qualification and belong to no law society. Nothing here is legal advice, and reading it creates no professional relationship between you and me.

That isn't a disclaimer tucked away at the bottom of a page. It's the reason the site is shaped the way it is. If I had a credential to show, signing my name might be enough. I don't, so the honest alternative is the opposite: show the work. Every figure here carries the section that sets it and a link to the official text of the Act or regulation, so you can check it in about a minute or take it to someone who does have that credential. How that works is in the methodology, and the full list of figures with their status is in official figures.

I'm also not in Canada. I write about Canadian law from outside the country, and I'd rather you knew that than found it out. It has two practical consequences, and I've allowed for both. First, I have no first-hand experience of how an employment standards office behaves day to day, so this site never tells you what an officer is likely to do; it tells you what the statute says and links the section. Second, every page goes through a Canadian usage check, because a reader in Ontario or Alberta shouldn't be reading someone else's spelling, someone else's dollars or someone else's dates. Where the site does have an edge over local habit, it's that it never runs on memory or on the way something is usually explained. The figure comes out of the Act, every time.

If this project ever earns enough to pay a Canadian employment lawyer to review pages on a schedule, that review gets commissioned and each reviewed page says who reviewed it and when. Until then, no professional signature appears here, commissioned or decorative.

Why this site exists

The reader's question is nearly always the same, and it's a narrow one: how much am I owed, and when do I get it? Someone has just been let go, or can see it coming, and needs to know whether the offer on the table clears the legal floor and by what date the money has to land.

That question has a precise answer in every Canadian jurisdiction, written down in a statute anyone can read. What it doesn't have is a good place to read it. The Acts are public and well drafted, but they're written for people who are used to statutes. The pages that rank for these questions tend to be law firm marketing, generic articles that treat severance as one thing from coast to coast, or calculators with no sources at all. The gap between what the Act says and what a person finds when they search is wide, and closing it is mostly method rather than expertise: read the section, store the figure with its date, and never let a page hold a number that isn't tied to its source.

The second reason is that this project is meant to pay for itself with advertising. I'm not hiding it; it's set out below.

The rules this site is written by

These aren't aspirations. They're the checks a page passes before it goes up.

• No figure without its source. Every amount on the site comes out of a data file that records the section that sets it, the link to the official text, the dates it applies between and the day it was last verified. If a figure hasn't been checked against the primary source, the site can't be compiled at all. That's an automatic control, not a good intention.
• Statutory minimums, and it says so. The site works out the floor your employment standards Act guarantees. It never estimates common law reasonable notice, and every page and every calculator says a lawyer may recover more.
• Math I do myself is labelled as such. When a figure has to be worked out from two official ones because nobody publishes the result, it's marked as our own math with the operation in view. It's never dressed up as an official figure.
• The answer comes first. No preamble about how complicated employment law is. The first paragraph of every page answers the question in the title, in plain text, without making you use the tool.
• Nothing is promised. You won't read here that you'll be paid, that you're certainly entitled to something, or that a claim will succeed. You'll read what the statute requires, what figure comes out of it, and what could make your real outcome different.
• Doubt gets said out loud. Where a section can fairly be read two ways and nothing settles it, the page says which reading it uses. Where an entitlement depends on your contract or your collective agreement, the page says so instead of averaging over it.
• Nothing is invented. No made-up authors, credentials, degrees, years of experience, case results, testimonials or visitor counts. Everything this site claims about who makes it is checkable, or it isn't written.
• No government text is copied. Facts are restated from scratch with the section cited. Short quotations come only from the text of a statute or regulation, in quotation marks, with the section given. Government guides aren't sources here and their wording isn't reproduced.
• Corrections are visible. When a figure is corrected, the change is dated in the project's change log and shows up in official figures. Nothing is edited in silence.

How this site makes money

Today it makes nothing. There's no advertising, no affiliate links, no sponsored content, and nothing is sold.

The declared intention is to pay for the site with Google AdSense advertising once it has enough content and meets the requirements of the program. When that happens:

• Ads will be labelled as ads and kept away from the content: never inside a calculator, never beside its controls, never on the legal pages and never on contact.
• Google serves those ads automatically. I don't choose which ad you see, and no advertiser has influenced or will influence what a page says. Nothing here is written because it pays better.
• Ads bring cookies, and the cookie policy describes them before they exist, with a consent panel where refusing is exactly as easy and as visible as accepting.
• There are no affiliate links, no referrals to law firms and no paid placements, and there won't be. If any other kind of income ever shows up, it gets declared on this page before it's used, and on the page where it appears.

What the site covers today

Two clusters, both finished before publication rather than announced ahead of time.

• What you're owed when your job ends, in all fourteen Canadian jurisdictions: the ten provinces, the three territories and the federally regulated sector. Notice of termination and pay in lieu, statutory severance where the statute has one, vacation pay on your final pay, the stat holidays that fall in the notice period, the deadline for the final payment and the deadline to file a complaint. The hub compares the fourteen and carries the calculator with a jurisdiction selector; each jurisdiction has its own page with its own schedules and the calculator preset to that statute.
• Employment Insurance after the job ends: the estimator for the weekly amount and the number of weeks, the official regional table stamped with the four-week period it covers, and a page for each province and territory with its own economic regions.

Both tools are described in calculators, and every figure they use, with its section, its validity and its verification status, is in official figures. The data file itself is published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence at /data/legal-data-2026.json, and the regional table at /data/ei-regions.json.

You won't find empty sections here, or pages announced before they're written. A topic goes up when it's written and verified in full, or it doesn't go up.

What the site doesn't do

It doesn't tell you whether your dismissal was lawful, whether a just cause allegation would hold up, or whether to sign the release you've been handed. It doesn't estimate common law reasonable notice, read your employment contract or interpret your collective agreement. It doesn't file anything for you, contact your employer or review your documents. And it doesn't take your personal information: there are no forms, no sign-up and no newsletter, and the calculators run entirely in your browser.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, I want to know, and it's the most useful thing you can write about. Send the address of the page, the exact figure or sentence, and the source that contradicts it if you have one. It gets checked against the primary source. If the error is real, the data file is corrected, which fixes every page and tool that uses that figure at once, the change is dated in the change log, and the site is republished. You get a reply either way. The full procedure is in contact.

How to get in touch

By email, at hello@owedatwork.com. There's no form and no other channel. Before you write about your own situation, read contact first for what I can't do: it sets out what to send, what never to send, and where to take a question about your own case.