There is no single Canadian rule. Some provinces make the employer pay for everything; others expect the worker to show up already wearing them.
Short answer
It depends on the province, and Ontario itself doesn't spell it out. The Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Quebec and Saskatchewan require employers to pay for all required PPE at no cost to the worker; British Columbia, Manitoba and Yukon explicitly put footwear (and often headwear) on the worker's own tab; Alberta singles out respiratory equipment as the employer's cost without addressing footwear the same way. Ontario doesn't fall clearly into either camp.
CCOHS's dedicated page on who pays for PPE makes the underlying problem explicit: “making sure that workers use PPE during the course of their work does not always mean all employers are required to pay for the PPE used by workers,” because the word “provide” “has no legal definition” across Canadian jurisdictions — it can mean helping a worker find and buy their own equipment just as easily as it can mean paying for it outright.
The province-by-province split is real and specific. Employers must pay for all required PPE at no cost in the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Quebec and Saskatchewan. British Columbia puts the cost split the other way for some items: “the worker is responsible for having clothing to protect against the elements, and general work purposes such as work gloves, appropriate footwear, and a hard hat,” while the employer covers other categories. Manitoba is blunt about it — “the worker is responsible for providing headwear and protective footwear” — and Yukon expects workers to already have “appropriate protective clothing … work gloves and footwear.” Alberta requires employers to pay specifically for respiratory equipment without a parallel footwear rule, and Nova Scotia leaves the allocation to be “best made by the workplace parties.”
Ontario sits in the group CCOHS describes as jurisdictions that “state ‘provide,’ specify use only, or are not specific about who purchases” — meaning the OHSA requires PPE be provided and used where the hazard calls for it, but doesn't itself allocate the cost the way BC or Manitoba do explicitly. In practice, that leaves the split to be settled by workplace policy, the employment contract, or a collective agreement — and whichever way you decide it, put it in writing, because there's no default in the statute to fall back on if a worker disputes it later.
Whatever gets purchased still has to meet a real standard: CCOHS points to CSA Standard Z195-14 (R2023), “Protective footwear,” as the applicable benchmark, and recommends organizations “set up a complete foot safety protection program, including selection, fit testing, training, maintenance and inspection” rather than treating boots as a one-time purchase. Paying for the boots and picking the wrong CSA grade for the hazard doesn't actually close the gap.
If you're setting PPE policy at the same time you're setting training policy, the two overlap more than people expect — see whether mandatory safety training itself is paid time, and if the crew in question is on a schedule that already brushes up against overtime, factor any PPE fitting or issuing time into that same weekly count: how overtime is actually triggered.
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