Not if the buyer’s offer was reasonable — but “reasonable” is undefined, fact-specific, and decided entirely by what the offer actually contained.
Short answer
Ontario Regulation 288/01 exempts “An employee whose employment is terminated after refusing an offer of reasonable alternative employment with the employer” from notice, and a parallel paragraph does the same for severance. Because ESA s.9(1) makes the purchaser “the employer” where it employs the seller’s staff, a reasonable offer from the buyer can trigger the exemption for the seller too — but neither the Act nor the Regulation defines “reasonable,” so the answer depends entirely on the offer’s own terms.
No fixed test exists in the text. In practice the offer is judged on pay, hours, duties, seniority credit, how much decision time the employee is given, and how much of the moving or transition burden the employer absorbs. An offer that preserves base pay, hours and title, credits existing seniority, and gives a real decision period carries the exemption; a bare-bones offer with a pay cut and 48 hours to decide plausibly does not — and every one of those levers is inside the offering party’s own control.
An offer can fail on the individual facts even where the general terms are sound. A documented mobility limitation, a genuine hardship, or an offer that quietly changes title, commute and compensation all at once can each take a specific employee’s refusal outside the exemption, even where ten colleagues on the identical offer are inside it. Build the purchase agreement’s employee-risk allocation to name a floor the offer must clear, and carve out individual hardship rather than assuming a uniform answer for everyone on the list.
Nova Scotia’s Labour Standards Code puts the identical idea directly in the statute: s.72(3)(e) exempts “a person who has been offered reasonable other employment by his employer” from the notice requirements. It carries higher stakes there, because s.71(1) bars an employer from discharging an employee of ten or more years’ service “without just cause” unless the person falls within one of a short list of exceptions — and the reasonable-offer exemption is one of them. For a long-service Nova Scotia employee, a reasonable relocation offer is not just about avoiding a notice bill; it can be one of the only lawful routes to ending the relationship at all.
The mechanic decided eleven employees who refused a buyer’s relocation offer, ten of whom the exemption covered and one of whom it did not. For what happens when integration changes make an offer stop being reasonable, see a title, a commute and a bonus plan changed at once.
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