Human Resources committee  I think you've put your finger on a long-standing problem in Canada, which is the tendency of employers to underinvest in training and developing their existing workforces because of the fear of poaching: that the skills will be poached and some free rider who isn't investing in

Human Resources committee  Yes. I think the federal government needs to invest much more in literacy and essential skills. This is a fundamental deficiency for vulnerable workers in precarious employment. Low-paid workers are often not the workers who receive training in the workplace. It's typically the h

Human Resources committee  I'll try to be brief. I think it's really irreplaceable and invaluable as a way to ensure workers' rights in the workplace. I think we have a long way to go to improve the compliance and enforcement of labour standards in this country, but there's really no substitute at the end

Human Resources committee  Absolutely. I think there's a deterrence gap in Canadian labour standards law and enforcement. I think that there's been a move too far toward incentivizing employers or encouraging them to live up to the basic rights and entitlements of workers in the workplace. I think there h

Human Resources committee  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 wit

Human Resources committee  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 th

Human Resources committee  May I just respond very quickly?

Human Resources committee  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.

Human Resources committee  Very quickly, I'm not aware of a single ILO definition of precarious employment. I do know that they think in terms of the transfer of risks and responsibilities from employers to individuals that I touched on. I think that the key components have to be a subjective and an objec

Human Resources committee  I think it doesn't benefit employees. We saw that same kind of manoeuvre when Mike Harris came to power in Ontario. There was this attempt to flexibilize the rules, or change the rules under the guise of flexibility, in a way that meant it undercut and circumvented those entitle

Human Resources committee  I think another dimension of that is the health and safety risks in the workplace. When you get that kind of decline in job quality, that rise in insecurity, and the sort of fissuring that's being described elsewhere, where you have a whole chain of subcontractors, each responsib

Human Resources committee  Yes, I think precarity represents a subsidy from employees to employers. When they drop pensions, when they remove benefit programs, that's the employers being subsidized by their own workers and by the taxpayers who have to pay those benefits in retirement and when workers get s

Human Resources committee  I think the federal government is already taking important steps to modernize or improve labour standards in the Canada Labour Code. I think that goes not only to part III, which is unrepresented non-unionized employees, but also to part I. A good example is the contract-flipping

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Chair, and good morning, committee members. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. The Canadian Labour Congress is Canada's largest central labour body advocating on behalf of three million workers across Canada. In the brief time I have, I will foc

Finance committee  The relatively modest amendments in Bill C-97 with respect to the CCAA and the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act would have had little impact in the case of Sears. The problem in the Sears Canada fiasco was that despite the pension plan having a funding deficit since 2007, the dire