Bill 105 Would Strip the WSIB Six-Year 'Lock-In' From Permanently Injured Workers

The six-year lock-in is one of the few things in Ontario's workers' compensation system that a permanently injured worker can count on. Section 44(2) of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act, 1997 bars the WSIB from reviewing a worker's loss-of-earnings payments more than 72 months after the date of injury. Once that window closes, the benefit is settled: no fresh assessments, no re-adjudication of what the worker could theoretically earn, no surveillance file reopened a decade later. Schedule 9 of Bill 105 would take that away — not by repealing section 44, but by walling it off. A new s.44(0.1) would confine section 44 to workers whose injury date is more than 72 months before the schedule's commencement, and a new s.44.1 would govern everyone else, letting the Board confirm, vary or discontinue payments on review and, absent a prescribed maximum, review them as frequently as it determines is appropriate (Bill 105 as amended by the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs (PDF) — Legislative Assembly of Ontario).

What that means in practice is a permanent state of review for anyone injured from here on. Kathrin Furniss, a lawyer at the Injured Workers Community Legal Clinic, told CBC that removing the lock-in "will open up a lot more appeals, adjudication, fights and surveillance." Carmine Tiano of the Provincial Building and Construction Trades Council of Ontario said workers "are going to be always under this conception that someone's watching them, that they're in a constant state of probation." CBC also spoke to Sean Staddon of United Steelworkers Local 6500, paralegal Michelle Zare, the Police Association of Ontario, and two Toronto Police Service officers on WSIB leave for PTSD who spoke anonymously (Injured workers could lose key protection under proposed Ontario bill, advocates warn — CBC News).

This is not a one-directional bill, and it should not be described as one. The same Schedule 9 would raise the loss-of-earnings rate to 90 per cent of the difference between a worker's pre-injury net average earnings and what they earn or are able to earn, with the old 85 per cent rate preserved for earlier periods, and would carry the 90 per cent figure through to the statutory minimums and survivor's benefits. A new s.43(1.1) to (1.9) would let workers aged 63 or older ask the Board to determine whether they are likely to work past 65 and until what day, with benefits running to that day. A new s.74.1 would deem privately operated residential care facilities and group homes into Schedule 1 coverage. The Injured Workers Community submission of May 14, 2026 to the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs supports all three of those changes. What it opposes is the lock-in removal — recommendation one of twelve is to retain the 72-month lock-in provision — and the new s.44.1(5) cap holding loss-of-earnings plus prescribed payments to 100 per cent of pre-injury net average earnings. The submission puts it plainly: Bill 105 "would replace the predictability and stability for many workers with a new section: 44.1" (Injured Workers Community submission on Bill 105, Schedule 9 — injuredworkersonline.org).

The accountability question is about the vehicle and the silence. A structural reduction in a permanent protection for injured workers is travelling inside a nine-schedule red-tape omnibus sponsored by the Minister of Red Tape Reduction, alongside talent agency regulation and assorted statutory housekeeping — the same pattern of using red-tape legislation as a delivery mechanism for substantive policy seen in the red tape act privacy carveouts. The bill's explanatory note does describe the section 44 amendment and the new s.44.1 review power; what it never does is use the phrase "lock-in" or frame the change as a loss of protection. And when CBC asked the province why it wants to remove the lock-in, the Ministry of Labour declined to say, offering only that it is "engaging with stakeholders."

If Bill 105 passes in its current form, the practical dividing line falls on the day Schedule 9 is proclaimed — a date left entirely to the Lieutenant Governor in Council under Schedule 9 s.11, and therefore undetermined. Workers injured more than 72 months before that day would keep the old section 44 and its lock-in. Everyone injured within 72 months of it, and everyone injured after, would fall under s.44.1 and could face review for the rest of their working lives. Two workers with identical injuries and identical permanent impairments could end up on opposite sides of a line neither of them chose and neither could have anticipated.

The administrative consequences run in one direction. A benefit that can be reviewed as frequently as the Board determines appropriate is a benefit that generates decisions, and decisions generate appeals. Advocates expect more adjudication, more medical re-assessment, and more surveillance — the costs of which fall on legal clinics, unions, and injured workers themselves, most of whom are managing a permanent impairment while doing it. Whether any of that is bounded depends on regulations that do not yet exist: s.44.1(3) sets no review limit unless a maximum frequency is prescribed, s.44.1(9) bars review only in prescribed circumstances, and s.44.1(11) leaves the remainder to regulation. The scope of the change would be settled after the vote, by cabinet, not in the bill MPPs are asked to pass.

Some categories of worker are carved out or partly protected. Under s.44.1(10), a worker who made a s.44(3) direction before the specified date could not be reviewed until after age 65. Bill 105 would also add s.44(2.1)(h) and s.44(2.2.1), opening review where the Board has determined a worker will work past 65 and permitting review at any time for periods on or after the worker turns 65 — the same post-65 flexibility that lets benefits extend past 65 also lets them be reassessed there. Loss-of-earnings entitlements remain tied to the maximum insurable earnings amount under section 54 of the Act; CBC reports that maximum as $121,700, a figure that appears nowhere in the bill text itself.

Nothing here is settled. Bill 105 has been ordered for third reading and the legislature returns October 27, which means the lock-in provisions can still be amended, split out of the omnibus, or voted down. The committee stage has already come and gone without touching them: the bill text on section 44 and section 44.1 is identical in the first-reading version and the committee reprint (Bill 105, first reading version (PDF) — Legislative Assembly of Ontario; Bill 105 — Legislative Assembly of Ontario). The remaining question is whether the government will explain, before the third reading vote, what problem removing the lock-in is meant to solve.