thanx A.I / Fresh consideration
In BC, changing an existing employment agreement needs fresh consideration. Carrying on working is not enough. It only sticks at a raise, a promotion, a bonus, a new benefit, or a new hire before their start date.
No — not on its own.
You can hand every employee a new contract tomorrow and have all of them sign it, and in British Columbia most of those signatures will bind nobody. The document will sit in the file looking like protection while providing none.
An employment agreement is a contract, and varying a contract requires consideration — something of value moving to the party being asked to give something up.
When an employer asks an existing employee to sign a new agreement with, say, a corrected termination clause, the employee is being asked to accept less than they had. For that to bind, they must receive something new in return.
Continued employment does not count. The employee already had their job before you asked. Keeping it is not a benefit they did not previously hold, and courts in British Columbia have declined to treat it as one in the employment context.
Nor do statutory minimums count — you cannot offer as consideration something the Act already required you to provide. And vague or unenforceable benefits do not count either; the thing given has to be real and it has to be linked to the agreement being signed.
There are moments when something genuinely new is being given, and those are the moments a corrected agreement will hold:
A raise. A promotion. A bonus. A new benefit — something above what the Act requires. Or a new hire, signing before their start date, where the job itself is the consideration.
Note the last one carefully. Before the start date. A contract produced on day one, after the offer was accepted and the employee has already resigned from somewhere else, may not bind either — the bargain was struck when the offer was accepted, not when the paperwork appeared.
Which means correcting a broken set of employment agreements is not a mailout. It is a plan laid over your payroll calendar: who is due a raise, who is up for promotion, when the next hires start, what benefit changes are coming. Each of those is a moment where a corrected agreement can be issued and will stick.
For most employers that is a twelve to eighteen month programme rather than an afternoon. It is slower than anybody wants. It is also the only version that produces enforceable contracts at the end of it.
There is a second-order point here that is worth sitting with. Because the fix runs on trigger events, it never really finishes — every raise cycle and every new hire is another moment where the paperwork either gets updated or falls further behind.
Before planning the rollout, find out which clauses are broken. Upload one agreement and we read it against the current Act and the decisions interpreting it, name every defect and the section it fails under, and flag what is missing entirely. Three minutes, free, no account.
The most common defect is explained here — it is in the termination clause, and it is in most BC agreements written before last year.
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.
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