If you run a business in Quebec and you’ve been searching “Bill 42,” you’re in the right place — even though, strictly speaking, it isn’t called a “bill” anymore. The legislation most people mean is Loi 42, An Act to prevent and fight psychological harassment and sexual violence in the workplace, which received royal assent on March 27, 2024. The “Bill 42” name stuck from its time moving through the National Assembly, and it’s still how a lot of employers look it up. Whatever you call it, the obligations it creates are real, they’re already in force, and they keep landing in stages.
This guide walks through what Loi 42 actually requires, the deadlines that matter, and the part most employers underestimate: the documentation you’re expected to keep. We’ll keep the legal explanation grounded in the law itself, and we’ll be straight about where a tool like SignalitUP fits and where it doesn’t.
A quick reframe: this isn’t a one-day change
One reason Loi 42 causes so much confusion is that it didn’t arrive all at once. It amended several pieces of Quebec labour legislation, and the changes rolled out across three dates.
The first wave took effect immediately on March 27, 2024. A second, larger set came into force on September 27, 2024. The last changes under Bill 42 are set to come into effect on October 1, 2025.
So if you reviewed your policies in early 2024 and moved on, there’s a good chance you’re already behind. The obligations that are easiest to overlook — the ones about written policy content and record-keeping — are concentrated in the later phases.
What changed first (March 27, 2024)
A few obligations kicked in the day the Act was sanctioned.
The biggest one broadened who you’re responsible for protecting employees from. Employers now have a broader responsibility to prevent psychological harassment by “any person” towards their employees, including suppliers, customers, clients or other third parties. In practice, that means a server being harassed by a customer, or a clerk dealing with an abusive supplier, now falls squarely inside your prevention duty — not just employee-on-employee conduct.
Two other early changes matter. The ARLS now prohibits employers from taking reprisals against employees or imposing sanctions for reporting harassment or cooperating in the reporting or complaint process. And the Act limited the old practice of letting time wipe the disciplinary slate clean: Bill 42 prohibits the application of amnesty clauses when dealing with disciplinary measures for misconduct involving physical, psychological, or sexual violence.
If you take nothing else from this section: retaliation against someone who speaks up isn’t just bad practice anymore, it’s a prohibited practice an employee can file against.
The September 27, 2024 wave: presumptions and CNESST access
This is where things got heavier, particularly around workplace injury claims tied to sexual violence.
Two new legal presumptions came in. A worker’s injury or disease is presumed to have arisen out of or in the course of work when it arises from sexual violence suffered in the workplace, and a worker’s disease arising within three months after the worker suffered sexual violence at the workplace is presumed to be an employment injury. The significance is in who has to prove what: these presumptions shift the burden of proof from the worker to the employer.
The window to bring a claim also widened. The Act extends the deadline for filing a CNESST claim from six months to two years for workers who suffered an employment injury or disease resulting from sexual violence.
There was also a change to medical records that surprises a lot of employers. As of September 27, 2024, employers will not have direct access to health records held by the CNESST; instead, an employer may designate a health professional, who can then provide a summary of the record as well as their opinion. Get this wrong and there are consequences — an employer or designated health professional who contravenes these rules is liable to a fine ranging from C$1,000 to C$5,000 in the case of an individual and from C$2,000 to C$10,000 in any other case.
When the burden of proof is on you and a worker has two years to file, the quality of your contemporaneous records stops being an administrative nicety. It becomes the thing your position rests on.
The part most employers underestimate: your written policy
Quebec already required a harassment policy before Loi 42. Since 2019, all employers have been required to adopt a psychological harassment prevention and complaint processing policy and to make it available to their employees. What Loi 42 did was spell out, in detail, what that policy now has to contain — and then make the policy itself mandatory under occupational health and safety law.
Effective September 27, 2024, the ARLS requires employers to develop and implement policies that set out the methods and techniques to identify, control, and eliminate risks of psychological harassment, and training for employees and managers on psychological harassment prevention. The required elements go further than prevention, though. The policy also has to address protective measures for people concerned with psychological harassment or those involved in the complaint process, and measures to protect the confidentiality of the complaint and information, including requiring employers to retain for at least two years the documents produced or obtained in the course of managing a situation of psychological harassment.
That two-year retention rule deserves a second read. You are now expected to keep, for at least two years, the records generated while handling a harassment situation. Verbal complaints and scattered email threads don’t satisfy that on their own.
Confidentiality also got stricter. Bill 42 requires all parties to a psychological harassment complaint to maintain the confidentiality of the resolution process unless all parties agree, in writing, to waive this obligation.
October 2025: the policy becomes part of your prevention program
The final phase ties everything together. The new requirement coming into force is that Québec employers must develop a workplace policy to manage and prevent psychological harassment, and that policy doesn’t sit on its own. Bill 42 provides that the policy must be incorporated into the employer’s prevention program or action plan as required by the Act respecting occupational health and safety.
There are real financial stakes for getting the policy obligations wrong. Employers who do not meet these requirements may be subject to fines of up to $6,000 for a first offence and up to $12,000 for subsequent offences.
What compliance looks like in practice
Strip away the legal language and Loi 42 asks Quebec employers to do a handful of concrete things:
• Have a written psychological harassment policy that includes the specific elements the Act lists, including prevention methods, training, protective measures, and confidentiality.
• Extend your prevention thinking to harassment from third parties, not just coworkers.
• Make sure nobody who reports or cooperates faces reprisal.
• Keep the documents generated while managing a harassment situation for at least two years.
• Be ready, if a claim reaches CNESST or the tribunal, to show what happened and what you did about it — because the burden may be on you.
Notice how much of that is about documentation and the ability to retrieve it later. Quebec didn’t just ask you to have good intentions; it asked you to be able to prove how a situation was handled, in writing, after the fact.
Where a reporting tool fits — and where it doesn’t
This is the honest part. No software makes you compliant with Loi 42 on its own. You still need a lawful policy, real training, and people who handle complaints properly. A tool can’t write your policy or run your investigation for you.
What a tool can do is help with the reporting channel and the record-keeping the law now leans on. That’s the role SignalitUP is built for.
SignalitUP supports compliance efforts under Loi 42 by helping employers provide a documented reporting channel, a centralized follow-up process, and a retrievable audit trail — available in French and English for Quebec workplaces, with a psychological harassment complaints procedure and documentation designed to support CNESST-related complaint handling and internal follow-up.
On the documentation side, SignalitUP creates a timestamped audit trail automatically: every signal logged, every follow-up documented. Given that Loi 42 expects you to retain harassment-management records and may put the burden of proof on you, having that trail build itself is the difference between a clean record and a scramble through old inboxes.
A few of the platform’s design choices line up naturally with the Quebec context:
• Anonymous by design. No phone numbers, no email addresses, no PII collected by default. Two-way anonymous chat handles follow-up without ever exposing the reporter — which makes the retaliation concerns Loi 42 cares about far easier to address.
• No app, no accounts. Workers scan a QR code from their personal phone and submit a signal in under a minute. The whole reason it gets used is that there’s nothing to download and no login to create.
• Data hosted in Canada. Encrypted in transit and at rest, with a timestamped audit trail.
• Bilingual EN/FR, available in French and English for Quebec workplaces.
And if reporting volume is the worry: when people feel safe, reporting increases and blind spots disappear. A visible, low-friction anonymous reporting channel is one your employees will actually use.
The bottom line
Loi 42 — the law a lot of people still search as “Bill 42” — has reshaped what Quebec employers owe their people, and it did it in waves that are easy to fall behind on. The throughline across every phase is documentation: written policies with specific required content, two-year record retention, confidentiality you can demonstrate, and a burden of proof that increasingly sits with the employer.
You’ll need legal advice for your policy and your specific situation; this article is an overview, not a legal opinion. But once the policy is in place, the day-to-day work is mostly about capturing what happens and being able to find it later. That’s the unglamorous part of compliance, and it’s exactly the part a documented, anonymous reporting channel is meant to carry.