Join me at HRPA: Domestic Violence in the Workplace

Wednesday, September 9, 2026 | 12:00 to 1:30 PM ET | OnlineFree for HRPA members. $45 plus tax for everyone else. 1.5 CPD hours.

Most HR professionals know that workplace violence and harassment are covered by health and safety and human rights law. Fewer know that Ontario law puts specific duties on employers when domestic violence follows an employee to work. Fewer still know that some of those duties can be triggered before anyone discloses anything.

I am delivering a webinar with the Human Resources Professionals Association on this issue.

What we will cover

We will start with a short overview of what intimate partner violence actually is. That includes the forms people do not always name as abuse, like coercive control, harassment, and technology-facilitated abuse.

Then we will work through a real case.

A junior employee just started working with you. Her partner calls her at work, over and over. Her office mates notice and say nothing. IT tells her the best they can do is suggest she silence her phone. The missed calls from senior colleagues start to make her look unreliable. When she finally tells an executive manager she trusts, she is brushed off. At home, the danger is climbing toward the risk factors that Ontario's Domestic Violence Death Review Committee links to lethal outcomes.

We will walk the same timeline three times:

1. What happened. The facts, start to finish.
2. What the law required. We will mark each legal duty as they arose.
3. What could have gone differently. Specific moments, and specific words a coworker, an IT desk, and a manager could have used instead.

Five areas of law

I will take you through the five areas most likely to come up for HR in a case like this:

• Occupational health and safety, including OHSA s. 32.0.4 and what the "ought reasonably to be aware" threshold really asks of you
• Employment standards, including how to administer domestic violence leave in a way that is both compliant and supportive
• Human rights, including intersecting grounds and two tribunal decisions we are still waiting on
• Privacy
• Child protection

Someone asked me to add a version where the employee works entirely from home, so we will spend time on that too. Remote work does not remove these duties. In some ways it makes them harder to meet.

The rest of the hour

We only have an hour of content, so this will be high level in places. I will close with a short look at how all of this fits inside a broader workplace domestic violence program, and I will point you to free resources if you want to go deeper on your own time.

Then we will finish with 30 minutes for questions.

Who this is for

HR professionals at any level who touch health and safety, employee or labour relations, training, leave administration, or investigations. It is built to be useful right away for generalists and managers, with enough depth for senior leaders who own policy and compliance.

Register

Registration is open through HRPA. Registration closes at 10:00 AM on the day of the session.

My thanks to HRPA for the invitation and for putting attention on an issue that too often stays outside the scope of HR practice.

Hope to see you there.

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