Construction employees are exempt from a long list of Employment Standards protections in Ontario and Alberta — but overtime pay is not one of the things either province takes off the table.
Ontario’s general rule is that “overtime begins after they have worked 44 hours in a work week” and “overtime pay is 1½ times the employee’s regular rate of pay”. Ontario then carves out construction employees from other protections: they are “not entitled to” daily or weekly limits on hours of work, daily rest periods, time off between shifts, weekly/bi-weekly rest periods, notice of termination or termination pay, severance pay, or (conditionally, on a vacation/holiday-pay-rate test) public holiday pay — but overtime pay does not appear on that exemption list.
Alberta reaches a similar split from a different starting rule. Its baseline is “all hours worked over 8 hours a day or 44 hours a week, whichever is greater”, paid at ‘at least 1.5 times the employee’s regular wage rate’, or banked as time off at 1 hour for each overtime hour worked, and “the basic overtime rule of 8 hours a day and 44 hours a week applies generally to employees in the construction industry” — construction workers there lose notice of termination but keep the same overtime formula as everyone else.
An Ontario framing crew works 50 hours in one week — nothing in the ESA construction exemption stops the employer scheduling that, since the daily and weekly hours-of-work caps do not apply to construction employees. But the overtime math is untouched by the exemption. At an assumed $32/hour regular rate: 44 straight-time hours × $32 = $1,408, plus 6 overtime hours × ($32 × 1.5 = $48) = $288, for a week’s pay of $1,696. The exemption changed what the employer was allowed to schedule; it did not change what the employer owes once the hours were worked.
See also: Travel time: paid or not? · ROE on a seasonal layoff · Automating construction payroll in Canada.
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