The provincial bereavement leave rules covered in the earlier post still apply to most Canadian employers, but if you operate a federally regulated business, there's now a separate and much longer leave category you need to know about. Bill C 59 amended the Canada Labour Code to create a distinct pregnancy loss leave of up to 8 weeks, effective December 2025, and it applies to any employee whose pregnancy ends other than by live birth at or after 19 weeks.
This isn't folded into bereavement leave and it isn't an extension of medical leave, though an employee might take both if their circumstances warrant. Pregnancy loss leave is its own thing, with its own eligibility criteria and its own protected period. The 8 week entitlement is job protected and unpaid, which means federally regulated employers can't terminate, demote, or otherwise penalize an employee for taking it. The leave can begin on the day of the pregnancy loss or on any day after that, and employees must provide written notice before taking it, though the Code allows for notice to be given as soon as reasonably possible after the leave starts if advance notice isn't feasible. Requiring someone to plan ahead for a miscarriage or stillbirth would be, after all, a peculiar expectation.
The same amendments expanded bereavement leave for the death of a child. Federally regulated employees already had access to 5 days of bereavement leave under the Code, but when the person who died is the employee's child, that entitlement now extends to 8 weeks. This means the Code now distinguishes between the death of a parent, spouse, or sibling, which remains at 5 days, and the death of a child, which triggers the longer leave. It's worth noting that "child" in this context includes a stillborn child, so there's potential overlap between the pregnancy loss leave and the extended bereavement leave depending on the circumstances and the employee's relationship to the pregnancy.
Federally regulated employers include banks, airlines, interprovincial trucking companies, telecommunications firms, and a handful of other industries that fall under federal rather than provincial labour law. If you've always operated under provincial employment standards and assume none of this applies to you, that's probably correct. But businesses that run interprovincial transport, or that have grown into federal jurisdiction through acquisition or expansion, sometimes don't realize they've crossed that line. The trucking company that used to haul freight within a single province and now moves goods across provincial borders may have stepped into a different regulatory world without anyone updating the employee handbook.
The documentation question that comes up with any leave, and which the earlier post addressed in the provincial bereavement context, applies here too. The Code doesn't require proof of pregnancy loss, though employers can ask for a medical certificate confirming the loss occurred and confirming the date. What employers can't do is demand documentation that would be unreasonable in the circumstances, and "reasonable" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The point is that the burden should not compound the loss, and any employer who treats this as an opportunity for skeptical gatekeeping is inviting both legal risk and the kind of workplace reputation that makes future hiring harder. It certainly makes you wonder where the line is though, doesn't it?
Understanding which employees fall under federal jurisdiction and tracking amendments like these is the kind of ongoing maintenance that most small and mid-sized businesses don't have the time or appetite for. That's exactly where Binder fits, quietly watching for the changes that matter and ready when your obligations shift. Let us know in the comments if you've had to navigate these new rules already or if you're just learning they exist.