Is it legal to track employees with GPS in Canada?

Short answer: yes, tracking a company vehicle during working hours is lawful across Canada, provided you have a real business reason, you tell people, and you do not collect more than the reason justifies.

The longer answer is that which law applies to you is not obvious, and most operators guess wrong. It depends on your province and on whether your business is federally regulated. This page is a plain-language summary to help you ask your own lawyer the right questions. It is not legal advice, and none of it is a substitute for advice on your own situation.

First work out which law applies to you

This is the part that trips people up. There is no single Canadian rule for employee privacy in the private sector.

• Federally regulated businesses - interprovincial and international trucking, courier and bus lines, railways, airlines, banks, telecoms and broadcasters - are covered by PIPEDA, and PIPEDA covers their employees' personal information. If your trucks cross provincial borders, this is probably you.
• Alberta and British Columbia have their own Personal Information Protection Acts, and both cover employee personal information for provincially regulated employers.
• Quebec is governed by Law 25, the strictest privacy regime in the country, with its own transparency, retention and accountability duties.
• Ontario and the remaining provinces have no general private-sector statute covering employee personal information. That does not mean anything goes - see the two sections below.

The four questions a regulator asks

Where a privacy law does apply, the test is not whether tracking is allowed in principle. It is whether this particular collection is appropriate. The federal Privacy Commissioner works through four questions, and arbitrators tend to reason the same way:

• Is the purpose a real, pressing business need? Dispatching the nearest van, proving a service visit, recovering stolen equipment and costing a job all qualify. General curiosity about staff does not.
• Is tracking likely to actually meet that need?
• Is the loss of privacy proportionate to the benefit? Tracking a vehicle's location is far easier to justify than continuous video or audio of a person.
• Is there a less intrusive way to get the same result?

Ontario: the written electronic monitoring policy

Ontario's Employment Standards Act now requires employers with 25 or more employees to keep a written policy on electronic monitoring of employees, and to give a copy to their staff. The headcount is measured on 1 January and the policy is due by 1 March.

One detail is widely misreported: the requirement is about transparency, not permission. It does not give employees a right not to be monitored, and it does not limit what you may monitor. It requires you to write down whether you monitor, how, and for what purpose - and then to hand that to your people.

Use our sample GPS tracking policy as a starting point →

What this looks like in practice

• Put the policy in writing before the first unit is installed, not afterwards.
• Tell your drivers directly. Covert tracking is held to a far higher standard and is difficult to justify outside a specific, documented investigation.
• State the purpose, and then stay inside it. Data gathered to prove service visits should not quietly become the basis of a discipline process you never mentioned.
• Decide what happens outside working hours. This is the sharpest issue with take-home vehicles - either stop tracking outside the shift, or say plainly that you do not.
• Set a retention period and stick to it. Keeping everything forever is as much a problem as keeping nothing.
• Be ready for an employee to ask what you hold about them. Where a privacy law applies, that is generally their right.

A note on what the technology does and does not settle

Tracking gives you an accurate record of where a vehicle was and when. It does not, by itself, change behaviour or resolve a dispute. What does that is a clear policy, explained in advance, applied consistently - with the record available when someone questions what happened.

That is also why the honest rollout tends to go better than the quiet one. People object far less to being tracked than to finding out they were.

How to roll out GPS tracking without upsetting your drivers →

Before you rely on any of this

Privacy law in Canada is moving quickly, and the rules differ by province and by whether your business is federally regulated. Treat this page as a guide to the questions, and confirm your own obligations with your lawyer before you rely on them. If it would help, we are happy to talk through how other fleets in your sector have handled the policy side.