Free Ontario Workplace Violence & Harassment Policy Template

Every provincially regulated employer in Ontario must have written workplace violence and workplace harassment policies — from your first employee, with no small-business exemption. Most templates you'll find are either American, generic enough to be useless, or forty pages of clauses nobody in a fifteen-person company will ever read.

Below is a free, editable template written for small Ontario employers and mapped to the duties in Part III.0.1 of the Occupational Health and Safety Act. Fill in the bracketed sections, get it approved and signed, and post it.

Download the free template

It's provided in RTF so it opens cleanly in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or Apple Pages. No email required.

Download the Template (.rtf)

What's in it

1. Statement of commitment — including the no-reprisal commitment, which is a duty in its own right and the clause most often left out.
2. Definitions that track the statute — workplace violence, workplace harassment, and the reasonable-management-action carve-out, so ordinary performance management isn't mistaken for harassment.
3. Concrete examples, because abstract definitions don't change behaviour.
4. Responsibilities split by role — employer, supervisor, worker — since supervisors carry duties personally under the OHSA.
5. A reporting path with a named alternate, for the case where the complaint is about the usual contact. Small employers forget this one constantly.
6. What happens after a report, including written notification of results to both parties.
7. Domestic violence and risk factors, which the OHSA addresses specifically.
8. Version, approval, and review fields — the policy must be reviewed at least annually, and an undated policy can't show that it was.

The policy is only a third of the obligation

This is where most template downloads leave people exposed. Under the OHSA you owe three things, not one:

1. The policies — written, reviewed at least annually, and posted in the workplace where six or more workers are regularly employed.
2. The programs behind them — a workplace violence risk assessment, and a written procedure for reporting, investigating, and dealing with harassment complaints. A policy statement is not a program.
3. Information and instruction for every worker on the policies and programs — including everyone hired after the policy was written.

A signed policy sitting in a shared drive satisfies the first item and nothing else. If someone asks you to demonstrate that your people were actually informed, you need a record showing who received the policy, which version they saw, and when.

Getting the acknowledgment on record

Emailing the document to your team and hoping is how the record ends up unprovable. In Ethica, you upload the finished policy, set the acknowledgment wording, and every employee gets a secure link by email — no account, no password. They read it, click to acknowledge, and the completion is recorded against them with a timestamp and the policy version. New hires are assigned automatically, and reminders chase anyone who hasn't responded.

If you'd rather not start from a blank page at all, Ethica's Ontario workplace violence and harassment course launches with the Government of Ontario's sample policy already in place, so you can swap in your own version whenever it's ready.

Not sure which other Ontario duties apply to a business your size? Answer three questions and find out.

This template and this page are general information, not legal advice. Ethica is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Government of Ontario. Adapt the policy to your workplace and confirm your obligations against the current text of the legislation.