Date: June 30, 2025

Read full update here: https://ridefair.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/July-1-second-class-labour-rights_Final.pdf

On Canada Day 2025, Doug Ford’s “Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act” will take effect, rolling back labour standards across the Province for a growing segment of workers.  The new legislation ensures gig workers have no effective minimum hourly wage and predominantly benefits US-based tech platforms, who can continue to exploit workers in Canada using practices that might otherwise be considered wage theft.

Thanks to in-depth studies produced by University of Toronto researchers for the City of Toronto, we can model what Ontario’s new “gig worker minimum wage” would mean for ride-hailing drivers in Canada’s largest marketplace.  The answer is sobering: given the number of drivers competing for rides and the high cost of offering ride-hailing services, a typical driver guaranteed $17.20 for an hour “on assignment” would lose $6.85 an hour (-$6.85) worked.

That’s because Ontario’s gig worker minimum wage:

• Applies only to time spent on “assignments” or actively delivering a service, not the hours workers are on-call, on duty, waiting for work;
• Applies to income before expenses (unlike in BC). The high cost of having and operating a car wipes out minimum wage earnings even for drivers who are constantly busy;[1]
• Is only applied to average earnings over a pay period, not ever hour worked, allowing “good hours” to be wiped out by “bad hours.”

In addition, there is nothing in the legislation to prevent platforms from using algorithms to pay workers different amounts for the same/equivalent work assignments based on their personal data, which will make it hard for workers to discover or prove unfair pay deductions and for regulators to detect wage discrimination.

[1] “On the Road” p 26 https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2024/ex/bgrd/backgroundfile-251343.pdf