Thank you, Chair.
Good morning to my colleagues.
Thank you to the witnesses this morning.
It's great to hear MP Seeback's support for unions. I think that's very encouraging and refreshing.
The purpose of the study for me when I put it forward was.... To go back, when I grew up, my dad worked for a company. It was called Murray and Gregory in Saint John. It was a lumber and woodworking company. My mom and dad had three kids—my brother, my sister and me. We grew up, I would probably say, lower middle class, in west Saint John.
As I got older and older, I realized that my dad never had a health plan. He never had a pension plan. He didn't have anything compared to a lot of his friends who were in similar industries. In fact, he made well below what they made. I kind of grew up in a non-union environment, but recognizing the value that union jobs had, the value they could bring to families and how they could kind of set the bar for wages.
Mr. Seeback talked about the union per cent drop across the country and what that would do to wages, but I want to change it to access to paid sick leave. I know that there was a study in 2023 in which the University of Regina found that workers with union coverage were more likely to have paid sick leave—80% compared to 55% for workers without union coverage—which, sadly, I don't think is a surprise to many of us. For workplace pensions, it was 82% compared to 37%, which is just stunning to me.
Ms. Bégin, thanks for your testimony. Can you talk about to what extent Stats Canada data on unionization and benefits is publicly available? Are there plans to release further data in this area?