Type your age, salary and years of service into an online severance calculator and it will hand you back a number with confidence. That number is a guess. Canadian courts have repeatedly said there is no fixed formula for reasonable notice, and the decisions below show just how far actual outcomes can move away from a simple months per year rule. This matters because three different legal ideas get blurred together whenever people talk about severance. Statutory termination and severance pay set minimum floors under employment standards legislation, and those floors differ across provinces and territories. A written employment contract can set out its own notice or pay in lieu formula, if the contract is enforceable. Separate from both of those is common law reasonable notice, the judge made standard that applies when there is no valid contractual limit, and it is common law notice that produces the wide swings in the cases described here.
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