You kind of stole my answer. I think that's where it starts. When I talk about precarious work, it starts with what we think the problem is that we need to solve here. For me, I point to someone like Allyson, whose personal lived experience is exactly the problem we want to solve. It's someone who is in a situation where they're potentially bouncing in and out of poverty, might not have enough to make ends meet and suffers all kinds of economic, social and health consequences. That, for me, is ultimately the real challenge.
To your point, or to your anecdote, the challenge speaks to my opening remarks. It's the nuance. How do we specifically identify those people? I think the point that Katherine was raising was that, hey, right now we use this idea of non-standard work and how all contract and part-time workers are precarious workers, but the reality is that it's probably not true.
I'll give examples. Go to Toronto and look at an IT consultant. They're on contract. They could be making upwards of $200,000 a year. If they're making that much money, are we really going to expend our efforts worrying that this person might not have a job in a year's time? No. They have the means to be able to save for the future, handle their own affairs and pay for their own non-wage benefits. But if someone is working in a six-month short-term contract, contract to contract, and they're making $25,000 a year, then yes, I am going to worry about that person.
Similarly, part-time work is the same deal. If there's a young woman who's working part time and trying to pay her way through school, and she wants to get more hours but she can't, necessarily, or she's taking night classes and can't get access to that so her income fluctuates from month to month, then yes, I'm going to worry about that person. But a retired civil servant with a good pension who's working part time to keep busy.... Again, they might be in an identical situation income-wise. Their wage earnings might be identical, but their situations are fundamentally different.
For me, the definition has to start at that point. What's the problem we want to solve? For me, it's that we need to prevent people from bouncing in and out of poverty. We have a good definition of poverty now, but what our social safety net doesn't do a good job of addressing is someone who is okay one month and not okay the next month. That is the real challenge. It's about starting with some sort of a threshold for annual earnings, monthly earnings or what have you, and then adding in these different nuances of what precarity means.
For me, one of those elements has to be income volatility, right? CPA Canada just produced a report estimating that upwards of a third of Canadians are now facing volatile incomes. Who knows what the level of income is, but volatile income in itself is a real challenge for a lot of folks.
It's going to be some sort of earnings threshold, something about income volatility. Something about preference, I think, is going to be really important too. The potential for dangerous work or employer misconduct also has to be there. I think what we have to do is cut up precarious work into its different elements so that we can start collecting data on all of those pieces in order to really enumerate who's really affected here.