Evidence of meeting #141 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was workers.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Wayne Long Liberal Saint John—Rothesay, NB
I'll just jump in with respect to federally regulated sectors.
What are the special challenges of this complaint-driven mechanism in the federal jurisdiction, given that many workers may not even know...? Again, I see this all of the time with constituents coming into my office. They don't even know that they work in a federally regulated sector.
National Director, Social and Economic Policy Department, Canadian Labour Congress
That's a huge question.
I think there need to be greater investments in staffing the inspectorate to support the kind of proactive, robust deterrence-based enforcement that would be important to achieving greater compliance with employment standards. I think working closely with the provinces to address employers that do straddle the boundary between jurisdictions....
You see that in airports a lot, where the entity setting the pace in terms of labour standards down through the value chain is a federally regulated entity but where the actual employer providing the subcontracted service is provincially regulated. There needs to be more coordination between the two.
Liberal
Wayne Long Liberal Saint John—Rothesay, NB
The final question is for you, Mr. Roberts. How would having a structured definition of precarious employment specifically help to inform enforcement activities, in the context of federal jurisdiction workplaces?
National Director, Social and Economic Policy Department, Canadian Labour Congress
I think it would certainly raise the priority and urgency of precarious employment. As I've said, I think it's a far greater problem in this country politically, as well as economically and socially, than many believe. I think it would focus attention in much the same way that this government has been effective in focusing attention on gender inequities, and other forms of inequities, by integrating them into fiscal decision-making and budgetary reporting and planning. We are beginning to do that around inequality as a fundamental issue. I think combatting precarity could also be a key objective. If adequate metrics are established, we could use them to track progress toward enhancing employment security and attacking precarity.
Liberal
Wayne Long Liberal Saint John—Rothesay, NB
Ms. Regehr, thanks for your presentation this morning.
You made a statement that more security means higher productivity. I was a small business owner. I certainly had to balance budgets, meet payroll, do accounts receivable and accounts payable and all those things. Can you just elaborate on the programs and initiatives our government has done to make workers feel more secure?
Chairperson, Basic Income Canada Network
I'm not sure that I can elaborate on a number programs that do that. My focus is really on income security, and the income piece. We have been particularly focused on looking at programs that do that for Canadians in very broad ways that aren't directly tied to labour force participation. Take seniors' benefits. A colleague talked earlier about how some people are working right up into their 80s. That applies. Seniors' benefits and the Canada child benefit enable people to work, stay attached to the labour force, maintain their family's health and well-being and make sure they have that resilience we've talked about, in order to participate in the economy. That strengthens the economy. It gives people the kind of flexibility and security that Chris was talking about.
One of the things I should have mentioned more in the results of our study is that one of the impacts we saw was an increase in people's ability to start or expand a small business, which we thought was quite a remarkable finding.
Conservative
Kerry Diotte Conservative Edmonton Griesbach, AB
Where do I start? There are so many avenues.
Ms. Nord, there's been talk this morning about a $15-per-hour wage, as one of the solutions to precarious employment. I know in Alberta it has had a devastating effect. A lot of businesses end up closing, particularly the food and beverage businesses.
What's your view on going towards something like that?
Director, Skills and Immigration Policy, Canadian Chamber of Commerce
Again, I think it fundamentally comes back to addressing the problem that doesn't have a multi-faceted answer. I think the chamber—I wouldn't want to speak for all of them unequivocally, but we would have a number of questions around that. Are we talking about minimum wage?
Conservative
Director, Skills and Immigration Policy, Canadian Chamber of Commerce
Yes. You can imagine what that might do to employment. We talk about precarity of work. You might have a higher hourly wage, but what are your total hours? These are business costs that are real. I think we have to look at how we address the problems, absolutely, but we would be very concerned in the business community. Again, there is a cost issue. There's also a jurisdictional issue. Where you have jurisdictions across the country, you have an urban-rural divide as well. I think this pushes upward costs that would really have to be analyzed in order to take it forward.
Conservative
Kerry Diotte Conservative Edmonton Griesbach, AB
I know that in Alberta, they found that it made work more precarious, because suddenly restaurateurs could not.... In order to pay that $15 minimum wage, they cut a worker. They laid off one or two people. They were forced to do that. It had the reverse effect.
Director, Skills and Immigration Policy, Canadian Chamber of Commerce
It doesn't have the benefits of being off.... Again, it's always the data and how we look at it and how relevant...but we would have a number of concerns absolutely therein.
Conservative
Kerry Diotte Conservative Edmonton Griesbach, AB
Ms. Regehr, the biggest solution in your mind would be to establish a guaranteed income for everybody. I hear your rationale for doing so, which is it gives people a chance to get back to school and gives them freedom and so forth. Ultimately, don't you believe that you'd have to sell Canadians on that? What do you think people would say to you if you say that we want to give all marginalized Canadians money so that they don't have to work? How would you sell something like that?
Chairperson, Basic Income Canada Network
We've already sold it. We have a Canada child tax benefit that provides a basic income to families and it's shown that it does not have that negative work effect that people fear. In the results of the Ontario pilot, even though they're truncated, all of the early results show that what that security did was enable people to do a better job of economic activity to be able to get to work and that sort of thing. I should stress too that we're proposing this as a solution. This is not the solution to everything. All of the other things that we've been talking about are critically important too, but it's that very basic level of security that people can count on that enables them to have the resilience to weather precarity and the uncertainty that we face going forwards. That's going to become increasingly important for people.
Conservative
Kerry Diotte Conservative Edmonton Griesbach, AB
I would like to ask Ms. Nord the same thing. What would you say? Do you think Canadians would accept that if we were to take the extreme view and say we're going to give everybody a basic income? To me that's sound very communistic.
Director, Skills and Immigration Policy, Canadian Chamber of Commerce
I can speak for the chamber. Again, it's rife with issues. The expert panel is exploring this, and we have a working group established that will have more defined recommendations and key messages. You'd have to survey the Canadian public at the end of the day. From the Canadian business perspective, we would absolutely have a number of concerns.
Conservative
National Director, Social and Economic Policy Department, Canadian Labour Congress
May I just respond very quickly?
National Director, Social and Economic Policy Department, Canadian Labour Congress
On the suggestion that basic income is a communist idea, I'll just point that it was Milton Friedman who was the originator of the modern idea of negative income tax.
