Yes in most of Canada, but Ontario is the outlier — it makes continuity conditional on a fact the other provinces treat as irrelevant.
Short answer
In British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec, an employee’s service survives a business sale automatically, whatever the buyer does. British Columbia’s Employment Standards Act says the employment “is deemed, for the purposes of this Act, to be continuous and uninterrupted by the disposition or receivership”; Quebec’s Civil Code says the contract “is not terminated by alienation of the enterprise” and “is binding on the successor of the employer.” Ontario is different: its Employment Standards Act, 2000 only deems continuity “if an employer sells a business or a part of a business and the purchaser employs an employee of the seller” — a buyer that never takes the employee on gets no continuity at all, and the employee’s relationship simply ends with the seller.
Ontario’s Employment Standards Act, 2000 s.9(1) is a deeming rule, not a guarantee — it only fires “if an employer sells a business or a part of a business and the purchaser employs an employee of the seller.” The word doing the work is employs. A buyer who declines to hire someone the seller employed is outside the provision entirely, and that person’s notice and severance stay with the seller on ordinary termination principles.
British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec do not build the same gate. BC’s s.97 provides that “If all or part of a business is disposed of, or the business continues to operate under a receiver or receiver-manager, the employment of an employee of the business is deemed, for the purposes of this Act, to be continuous and uninterrupted by the disposition or receivership” — with no requirement that the purchaser actually take the employee on. Alberta’s Employment Standards Code s.5 is worded almost identically. Quebec goes further still: Civil Code art. 2097 provides that “A contract of employment is not terminated by alienation of the enterprise or any change in its legal structure by way of amalgamation or otherwise. The contract is binding on the successor of the employer,” so the relationship itself survives the sale, offer letter or none.
Because BC and Alberta’s continuity is automatic rather than hire-conditional, both name a receivership expressly rather than leaving it to inference, and it survives one too. A buyer expecting a receivership to hand it a clean workforce, on the Ontario model of a fresh start, gets the opposite result in BC or Alberta.
The Ontario/BC contrast decided an Ontario deal team building a BC workforce plan around a condition BC’s law does not have. The receivership version played out in a buyer that expected a clean slate out of an Alberta receivership and got Alberta’s own deeming rule instead. For what happens when the automatic rule is measured on the wrong facts, see the same fourteen-week payroll gap run across four provinces.
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