Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I will speak in English. I apologize for that.
I will answer questions in French.
I hold the Canada research chair in occupational health and safety law at the University of Ottawa. I'm going to restrict my comments to the occupational health and safety and workers' compensation issues related to precarious employment, but I'm happy to speak more broadly in the question period.
There is a brief that I have provided with references. I will, in the six and half minutes now left, just target the really key issues.
First of all, in terms of definitions, the take-home message is that precarious employment does not have an absolute definition, and it depends on the context in which you're asking yourself the question. The core categorization of precarious employment always includes non-standard employment, which is non-standard as compared to the usual full-time, indefinite employment. It could be precarious because of time, such as for temporary, part-time or on-call workers. It could be because of space; you could be a home-based worker. That's part of precarious employment. It could be because of the employment relationship, such as those who have a triangular employment relationship, like workers who are working for temporary employment agencies or subcontracting, or those who are self-employed. The self-employed very often get forgotten in the regulatory frameworks. Occupational health and safety is a problem for all these categories of workers, but please do not forget the self-employed because we tend to forget the solo self-employed.
I'm cutting to the chase because I'm sure I'm going to run out of time, and then I'm going to go back and walk you through why I arrived at these conclusions.
You, as the federal government, have two hats. You have a hat as a regulator and a hat as an employer. Again, I'm just restricting myself to health and safety and workers' compensation. The types of issues I suggest you look at as a regulator are, first of all, making sure that the self-employed are included in part II of the Canada Labour Code, in terms of prevention. This is because if there's competition between employers who have salaried workers and people who are not obliged to obey the rules, you're going to have difficulties in terms of reducing to the lowest common denominator in working conditions.
Second, you should be paying attention to subcontracting and precarious contracts, particularly in certain sectors that fall within the remit of the federal government. It's not exclusively trucking, but interprovincial trucking would be something I suggest you look at. In terms of shipping, there are issues in relation to temporary workers who do not have the same protections in the shipping industry. There are, of course, many other industries as well.
As a regulator, again, were there to be a workers' compensation program for federal employees, you would be able to even the playing field. If somebody is working in Gatineau and they are precariously employed by the federal government, they have better rights than somebody who is working on the Ottawa side of the river. That shouldn't be, in my opinion.
Finally, as an employer, you can set some examples. Minimize your reliance on temporary agency workers. There have been issues in the past where several million dollars' worth of federal money goes to employees of temp agencies. Try to avoid outsourcing to the self-employed. It used to be that interpreters under the federal jurisdiction were salaried workers. They are now self-employed. This is a form of outsourcing. It has consequences for regulatory protections. Make sure that your employees are hired on indeterminate contracts as much as possible. Finally, ensure that no employee who wishes to work full-time is obliged to work part-time because part-time can be a blessing or a curse. If it's involuntary, it's a curse.
I'll now get to the underpinnings of this with the remaining time I have.
We've talked about definitions, the links between occupational health and safety and precarious employment. The short version is that studies around the world and studies at the ILO in particular bring together the literature that shows that various categories of precariously employed workers are more likely to have work accidents. They're more likely to have health and safety problems. The Quebec study that I was part of, EQCOTESST, has shown that they're more likely to have a work accident in Quebec. We have data on that. We also have data on sexual harassment and temporary work contracts. You're more likely to be sexually harassed if you're in a precarious job, and particularly if you're working on a temporary basis.
The second key issue, in terms of health and safety legislation and regulatory effectiveness, is what works and what doesn't. The short version is that across Canada and federally, the internal responsibility system underpins our occupational health and safety legislation. We count on workers to speak up if they're exposed to dangerous working conditions or obliged to do something dangerous. That doesn't work with the precariously employed, both the self-employed who will take contracts that they shouldn't because they're afraid they're not going to be able to earn their living, but also temp agency workers who do not speak out. There's lots of data on this. It's something to be looked at, what we call worker voice.
There is another point that I think is important to make. I was involved in a study in Ontario on temp agency workers. We did find, speaking to labour inspectors in particular, in Ontario, that there were many cases in which a client employer would bring in a temp agency worker to do something dangerous that they didn't want to give to their regular employees. In one case that the inspector shared with us, there was a death that was predictable.
We also know that what drives this type of behaviour is not that employers are nasty people who want to kill temp agency workers; rather, it's because there are economic incentives in the workers' compensation system to avoid having your people injured. That drives precarious employment. Ontario, to its credit, has changed its law in light of that study. It's something that should be reflected upon as well.
The other issue is in terms of disorganization, and this is something documented by the ILO. In precarious employment, particularly in the context of triangular employment relations where you have a temp agency, a client employer, a worker, and sometimes it's cascading subcontracting, nobody knows whose responsibility is what. Disorganization is a negative outcome of precarious employment and leads to regulatory failure in Canada, in the provinces, and really, in many other countries.
I will conclude with a word on workers' compensation. This is not your jurisdiction, normally, but we do know, and this is work we're doing now, that the precariously employed in every province in Canada are under-compensated because they're compensated on the basis of their salary at the time. Quebec is better because at least there is a floor, so it's never under minimum wage full time if you are injured and become paraplegic while you're working at McDonald's. This creates lots of problems for workers across Canada, particularly outside of Quebec, and should be the object of reflection to make sure that everybody is valued as if they can work full time. It's often new immigrants and other populations who are stuck in these temp agencies. I could talk about that later.
Thank you.