A First Hire Should Not Require a Second Job in Administration

RC/TM/2026/T.9 · Letter from the table · 5 June 2026

To the Team Council

I support the direction of TM-001. A small employer should not have to choose between taking on work and taking on a maze of costs and administration. But I ask the Council to amend the fix before it becomes a standard: make the relief automatic, make it follow the first ten hires over time, and keep workers’ contributions and protections intact.

I put the question in my First Ten Hires diary on 9 March. I had work I could no longer comfortably manage alone. I was considering one person for about 30 hours a week at $20 an hour. That is roughly $2,600 in gross wages in an average month, before the costs and obligations on the employer’s side. I did not want to hire informally. I wanted to know what I would owe, when I would owe it, and what I had to register before the first shift.

The first number was not the difficult part. The difficult part was turning the number into a reliable monthly commitment. In Ontario, I would need to handle payroll deductions and remit the required amounts to the Canada Revenue Agency. The employer also pays its share of Canada Pension Plan contributions and an employer premium for Employment Insurance. Vacation pay is another cost: for an employee with less than five years of service, Ontario’s minimum is generally four per cent of wages. Depending on the work and the business, Workplace Safety and Insurance Board coverage and premiums may also apply. The rules are not all the same, and a small employer cannot assume one registration or one calculation settles every obligation.

I tried to make a single cost sheet. I wrote down the $2,600 monthly wage figure, added $104 for four per cent vacation pay, and left separate lines for the employer’s CPP and EI costs and any applicable WSIB premium. I also noted that Ontario’s Employer Health Tax has an exemption for eligible employers with annual Ontario payroll at or below $1 million. That is useful, but it does not remove the need to work out which obligations apply, set up payroll correctly, and reserve enough cash for the dates they fall due.

On 12 March I went through the CRA payroll information and its Payroll Deductions Online Calculator. That helped with deductions, but it did not give me one dependable answer to the broader question, “What will this hire cost me, and what do I need to do next?” I still had to distinguish money withheld from the worker’s pay from the employer’s own costs, check the Ontario requirements, and determine whether workplace insurance applied to my situation. I was not looking for a loophole. I was trying to make a decision without discovering, after hiring, that my estimate had missed a recurring obligation.

On 18 March I delayed the decision. That is the part I want the Council to take seriously. A delay does not show up neatly in a payroll table. It is a task that stays with the owner, work that cannot be delegated, and a person who is not hired. I can budget for a known cost. It is much harder to budget for a cost that is fragmented across rules, accounts and separate calculations.

The draft fix should reduce both the cost and the uncertainty for the first ten hires. I would amend it in three practical ways.

• Make relief automatic at payroll. Once an eligible employer has registered its payroll account, the system should identify eligible early hires and apply the relief to the employer’s qualifying contributions. Do not make a new employer pay the full amount first and then navigate a separate application to get it back.

• Count hires cumulatively, not only as a headcount on one day. A small employer may hire one person, lose that person, and later hire another. The support should be available across the first ten individual hires, with a clear rule for part-time work and replacement hires. A published definition and a simple account record would be more predictable than asking each employer to interpret the boundary.

• Protect the worker’s side of the bargain. Any phase-in should reduce or credit the employer’s eligible cost, not reduce the employee’s CPP record, EI coverage, vacation pay or employment standards. The aim is to make formal hiring more affordable, not to make formal work less secure.

There is a federal-provincial problem here. Payroll deductions and employer contributions involve federal rules; vacation, employment standards and workplace insurance also involve provincial rules. I do not expect one office to erase that division. I do think the standard should require a usable path through it: one guided registration flow where possible, a short checklist that says which authority handles each obligation, and a single first-ten-hire cost statement that distinguishes employer costs from deductions taken from wages.

The statement should show the dates as well as the amounts. A new employer needs to know what must be withheld from the employee, what the employer must add, when remittances are due, and which costs depend on the work or industry. If an amount cannot be calculated until a classification is confirmed, say so early and say where to confirm it. Predictability is not the same as pretending every business has identical costs.

I am not asking the Council to promise that hiring will be cheap. Wages are real costs, and workers deserve to be paid properly. I am asking for the first formal hire not to trigger a penalty for being small: a stack of separate steps, a cash-flow shock, or a decision postponed because the owner cannot get a clear answer. A phased, automatic employer-side contribution relief, paired with one guided payroll route and stable rules, would make the proposal more practical and more credible.