We’ve spent the past five years reinventing the workplace around flexibility. Remote work, hybrid schedules, mental health days, four-day weeks — all born from a recognition that rigid structures built for another era no longer serve us well.
Yet flip to the bereavement leave section of almost any collective agreement or employment standards guide, and you’ll find policy that looks like it was drafted by a Victorian genealogist with a ruler and a bloodline chart.
Four days for your mother. One day for your uncle. Nothing for the friend who was more family than your estranged brother ever was. Nothing for the dog who greeted you every morning for 14 years.
The mathematics of mourning, it turns out, remain stubbornly formulaic.
I pulled a couple of collective agreements at random to make the point. First up was the one between Hampton Inn/Homewood Suites and the United Steelworkers. Four consecutive days with pay for a spouse, parent, child, grandchild, sibling, or in-law. One day for a spouse’s grandparent, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew. The language is precise, lawyerly, utterly unambiguous. It also bears no resemblance to how human beings actually experience loss.
Next up was the one governing the relationship between workers at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LBCO). The logic was similar: four days for immediate family, three for extended relatives, one day if your aunt or uncle dies.
Both agreements include thoughtful provisions — extra days if you must travel more than 150 kilometres, the option to split leave if burial happens months after death. These aren’t callous policies. They’re just blunt instruments trying to measure something immeasurable.
What the law says
Across Canada’s provinces and territories, employment standards legislation paints much the same picture. Ontario mandates two unpaid days per year. Saskatchewan offers five, but only if taken within a week of the funeral. Quebec provides two paid days and three unpaid for certain relationships, one unpaid day for others.
The Northwest Territories at least acknowledges geography, granting seven days if the funeral takes place outside your community versus three if it’s local. But everywhere, the same premise: your entitlement to grieve depends on where someone fell on a family tree.
Tangled roots
The trouble is, family trees don’t grow in neat rows anymore. Perhaps they never did.
You might be estranged from the mother who raised you but devastated by the death of the woman next door who was more like a parent to you growing up. Your best friend’s father, who taught you to change a tire and showed up at your university graduation, dies suddenly — but he’s nobody according to the bereavement grid.
The colleague who became your closest confidant over seven years of working side by side, who knew your fears and ambitions better than most of your relatives, passes away at 53. Use a sick day and lie, or show up to work and pretend you’re fine.
And then there are the losses that register seismically in your heart but don’t appear on any policy document. A miscarriage at 11 weeks — increasingly recognized in legislation, though often only for the person who was pregnant. A beloved pet whose absence leaves the house feeling wrong. A mentor who changed the trajectory of your career. We know these losses matter. We just don’t know how to bureaucratize them.
Employers, for their part, appreciate clarity. When an employee says their grandmother died, the policy says four days, the form gets signed, the payroll adjustment gets made. No judgment calls, no uncomfortable conversations about whether this particular relationship merits time away. The grid protects everyone from subjectivity.
Except subjectivity is precisely what grief demands. Loss doesn’t present itself in neat categories. It arrives unbidden, often from directions we didn’t expect, and it needs what it needs — not what a decades-old arbitration decision determined was reasonable for “most cases.”
Flex days for mourning
So here’s a thought worth considering: flexible bereavement leave. Not a grid, but a bank. Five days a year, perhaps, that an employee can use when someone significant to them dies. No list of approved relationships. No hierarchy of mourning. No need to explain whether the person who died qualifies under subsection (b) of article 18.2.
The objections are predictable. People will abuse it. Someone will take five days off because their childhood neighbour’s cousin died. We need objective standards.
But notice what we’re really saying: We don’t trust employees to know when they’re grieving. We trust them to work remotely without supervision, to manage their own schedules, to represent our organizations to clients and customers. We trust them with company assets, confidential information, and six-figure budgets.
But we don’t trust them to recognize when they need time to mourn.
Bereavement leave that accommodates life as it’s actually lived wouldn’t solve everything. Some losses require more than a few days, more than any policy can reasonably provide.
But it would acknowledge a simple truth: in an age when we’ve finally accepted that people are more productive when we trust them with flexibility, we’re still measuring their sadness with a ruler from 1950. The person sitting three cubicles down who seems distracted this week might be mourning someone you’ve never heard of. Someone who mattered enormously. Someone who doesn’t appear anywhere on the approved list.
Maybe it’s time the list caught up to life.
