The law moved. In November.

On 28 November 2025, Bill 30 amended the British Columbia Employment Standards Act to create a new job-protected leave for serious personal illness or injury.

An eligible employee may take up to 27 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave within a 52-week period. The leave does not have to be continuous — it can be broken up across the year — but it is taken in increments of at least one week.

Before this, British Columbia had no comparable extended medical leave in its statute. The amendment brings the province into line with protections that already existed in Ontario, Manitoba and Québec.

An employer may require a certificate from a doctor or nurse practitioner confirming that the employee is unable to work for medical reasons, and the dates over which the leave is required.

That is a narrower right than many handbooks assume. Separately, in November 2025 the rules on sick notes changed as well — both which health professions may issue one, and the circumstances in which an employer may not request one at all. A clause demanding a doctor’s note for any absence of any length may now reach further than the law allows.

The leave is job-protected. An employer cannot terminate or penalise an employee for taking it. That interacts directly with the termination, absence and attendance provisions of an employment agreement — and with any policy that treats a long absence as abandonment or cause.

The practical point is simple. If your new hire package was written before 28 November 2025, it does not mention this leave. Most packages in this province were. That is not a criticism of whoever drafted it; the leave did not exist when they did.

It is a good illustration of the underlying problem. Employment paperwork gets written once, filed, and reused for years, while the statute underneath it keeps moving. An agreement is only ever current as of the day it was drafted.

1 August 2026 — Bill 10 changed the employment standards complaint process, investigation procedure, interest calculation and tribunal appeals.

6 August 2026 — the reservists’ leave provisions were amended.

3 September 2024 — regulations were introduced for online platform workers.

And minimum wage is now adjusted annually, which means any fixed wage figure written into an agreement goes stale on its own without anybody touching it.

One thing that has not changed: section 63, the compensation-for-length-of-service schedule, was not amended in 2024, 2025 or 2026. If your termination clause was wrong before, it is still wrong for the same reason. That defect is explained here.

Upload your agreement and we read it against the current Act, including the amendments above, and tell you what is absent as well as what is defective. Findings are free, there is no account, and it takes about three minutes.

We are not a law firm and this is not legal advice. A lawyer licensed in British Columbia must review and approve anything before it is issued to an employee.