Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members. My name is Francis Fong, and I am the chief economist at the Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada, or CPA Canada.
Our organization is one of the largest national accounting organizations in the world, representing more than 210,000 Canadian chartered professional accountants. Collectively, CPA Canada and the profession are committed to acting in the public interest and promoting social and economic development here in Canada. Through our public policy research, we have similarly identified precarious work as a key issue facing Canadians and one that lacks a clear definition, resulting in difficulty quantifying the extent of the problem and developing policies to address it. We were extremely pleased to hear that this committee had taken on the important work of studying the issue of precarious employment.
CPA Canada published a report last year that examines the impact of precarious work, highlights the need for an accepted definition and even proposes a starting point for a definition. The report elaborates on the challenges I will discuss here in defining precarious employment. First, though, I will give some context.
Canada's labour market is evolving at a rapid pace. Changes related to technology, the structure of our economy and even the nature of how consumers expect to receive their goods and services today have resulted in a fundamental shift in the structure of firms' business models and the traditional employer-employee relationship.
While the labour market was once dominated by full-year, full-time employment, Canadians are now finding themselves in more precarious circumstances, in work that is unstable, insecure, uncertain and potentially vulnerable to employer misconduct.
The challenge for researchers and policy-makers is that we simply do not know how many Canadians are affected, because we lack a formal definition. I liken this to our long-standing debate about poverty in Canada, because we lacked a definition for a very long time. Because we lack a formal definition, no labour market or other economic data is collected on the precariously employed, so enumerating these individuals is difficult.
Currently our alternatives are twofold. Either we leverage the existing data as a proxy—and I'll point to my colleague, Ms. Lippel, who brought a great example of focusing on things like non-standard work as an example of how we define precarious work today—or organizations define the issue themselves and collect their own data, for example, by collecting their own survey data.
With the former, as I mentioned, the best we can do is leverage data on non-standard employment, arrangements such as part-time, temporary and casual work, and state that those involved are at higher risk of being precariously employed. However, in our view, non-standard employment is ultimately not necessarily precarious employment.
With the latter approach, the challenge is that each organization's definition differs to some degree, meaning there's no comparability. Also, since that data isn't collected by Statistics Canada, it isn't comparable to the wealth of other economic and social data that we have available, which can be linked to further identify the challenges faced by the precariously employed population.
Those challenges can be significant. We know that precarious work—and I'll point to my colleague, Ms. Schmidt, who gave us a great example of that—tends to feature less stable incomes, a lack of access to non-wage benefits, and in some cases even exclusion from our basic social safety net.
Consider those working in the gig economy. I raise the gig economy as an example, not because it's the extent of precarious work. They may face a low level of income that varies significantly from month to month based on the availability of work. At a minimum, this results in a lack of ability to save for the future. In a worst-case scenario, it leads to bouncing in and out of poverty. Because they're not considered employees by many of these firms—someone, for example, driving for Uber would be considered self-employed—they aren't given a T4, so they are not entitled even to basic things like employer contributions to the Canada pension plan or to employment insurance, basic things that underpin the social safety net that Canadians have depended on for many years.
From the perspective of our discussion, then, the challenge isn't just about gig workers who are precariously employed. That is simply one example. The challenge with defining precarious work is nuanced. The variety of situations precarious workers may face is vast, and I can go into many different examples when we go deeper in our discussion. From a definition perspective, if our definition is too narrow, we risk excluding people who are truly in need. Conversely, if the definition is too broad or vague, we risk that supports we ultimately develop and provide will be spread too thinly to make a difference, or that regulations we impose capture false positives.
For that reason, our report proposes a definition that covers any work arrangement that lies at the intersection of low earnings, high income volatility, uncertainty in future employment and potentially the presence of employer misconduct.
I hope the committee will find this a useful starting point for its deliberations. We have provided copies of this report in both languages.
I'd like to thank the committee again for taking on this important work. I look forward to your questions.