Front Burner - The fight over paid sick leave

Episode Date: April 29, 2021

As the third wave dominates ICU across the country, this week Ontario and B.C. each finally buckled to pressure and announced the introduction of, at least some, mandated paid sick leave. But the urgent call remains in other provinces. So why is it such a fight to get it? CBC senior writer Aaron Wherry explains.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem, brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey everyone, it's Jamie. I want to start the show today with a short story. This is Dr. Michael Warner, head of critical care at Michael Guerin Hospital in Toronto, and he's explaining why his ICU patients are in desperate need of paid sick days. Now my patient is in her mid-40s. She got COVID-19

from her husband, who got it at the factory that he works at. They also have a young child. He does not have paid sick leave. He earns $19.25 an hour, working 40 hours a week and 52 weeks a year. Each day of work earns him $133.21 net. With that money, they have to cover their expenses. Their expenses include rent, which is $11.90 per month for a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment. With what's left over, about $56 per day, they have to cover the necessities of life, which includes hydro, food, clothing, transportation for them to get to and from work, cell phone, and then internet access for their child so that they can participate in online learning. So you can see that if he has to miss a day of work to get a test, to get a vaccine, or because he feels unwell, he misses out on $133.21, which could be the difference between

him meeting rent and missing rent. It's because of stories like this that so many workers advocates have been saying the dire need for paid sick days has been growing ever since the beginning of the pandemic. This week, it all came to a head when Ontario asked the Canadian government to piggyback on a federal program, one that's been highly criticized. Then, BC announced it would bring in its own program, though details are pretty scant. And after a back and forth with Ottawa, Ontario said Wednesday that they will introduce a bill for temporary access to three seamless paid sick days. With this new additional provincial funding,

workers could now receive a total of $1,000 a week. CBC writer Aaron Wherry is in Ottawa, and he's been following this story. And he's here with me now to explain the latest, why some provinces haven't budged at all, and what it says about Canada's pandemic response. Hi, Aaron. Always great to have you with us. Great to be back.

So much of this story has been focused on Ontario Premier Doug Ford, so I think it makes sense to start at the beginning here. And Aaron, can you take me back to 2018? What did the newly elected progressive conservative government do then that is so relevant today? When I traveled across this province and talked to thousands and thousands of people, I found out very, very quickly, the number one issue was Hyrule. Number two was Bill 148. Yeah, so the PCs, Doug Ford's PCs, come into government in 2018. And they're faced with what was actually a fairly new policy at that point, which is a couple days of paid sick leave in Ontario that was introduced sort of at the very end of the Ontario Liberal government's time in office when Kathleen Wynne was premier.

time in office when Kathleen Wynne was premier. And, you know, the Ford Conservatives come into government with this very, you know, sort of pro-business, pro-economy, going to get things going again idea. And that part of that is they're going to take away these two days of paid sick leave because that adds a cost to businesses. And, you know, the Ford government is all about making Ontario open for business again. And so paid sick leave quickly gets caught up in that change of government, essentially. Right. We're getting rid of Bill 148 because 60,000 people lost their jobs under Bill 148. And just to be clear here for everyone listening, the majority of workers in Canada are covered by provincial labor laws. And so pre-pandemic, what is the landscape of

paid sick days in the rest of the country? It's not a lot. Obviously, some people may have paid sick leave through their employer as a result of being in a union or something that an employer has decided to offer. But in terms of mandated public paid sick leave by governments, you're looking at Quebec with a couple days and Prince Edward Island with one day. And that's basically it. Right. And you mentioned that people obviously have access to paid sick days through their employers. But do we have a sense of just how many people in this country don't actually have access to paid sick days? Yeah, it's a lot. I think it's very easy if you have paid sick leave,

like someone like you or me, it may be easy to imagine that that's sort of the standard. But going back to 2016, the latest sort of data we have, 58% of workers reported not having access to employer paid sick leave. And among those earning less than $25,000 a year, that goes up to 74%. So it's a big majority of people who don't have employer-paid sick leave. And then it's particularly an acute issue with people who aren't making a lot of money. All right. So that is the landscape pre-pandemic. And then now let's fast forward.

We've got this global pandemic, a very contagious virus that obviously spreads less if people who are sick are able to stay home from work. And right at the beginning of this, calls for mandated sick days really ramp up. A lot of my colleagues who are the backbone, who are taking care of everyone in the hospital system don't have paid sick days either. Your landlord's still going to be requesting your rent. If you have a family to feed, your kids are still going to be expected to be fed.

So for us, the fear of just losing a day's pay, it's too much for us to bear. We're going to bend these pots until we get paid sick days. Paid sick days across Ontario. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was really talking about this last spring, last summer. First and foremost, that the government commit to paid sick leave for all Canadians. This is vital. We're in a pandemic.

No Canadian should have to choose between going to work sick or staying at home, not knowing if they can pay the bill. So what ends up happening? So you're right. It becomes pretty quickly after the pandemic's first wave last spring, it starts to come up and become apparent that you're going to have to find a way to make it easy for people to stay home. So that's how you get policies like CERB, like the various federal relief programs. But that also gets this call for paid sick leave.

You need paid sick leave. You need to allow people who aren't feeling well to stay home. And federally in Ottawa, that gets taken up by the NDP and put to the federal government. And the NDP says, you've got to bring in paid sick leave. And the minority liberal government that is always having to bargain with the other parties to stay in office and to keep things going, eventually makes a commitment to the NDP that they will discuss this with the provinces and try to advance the discussion on paid sick leave. A few months pass and eventually what comes back is the federal government steps in and says we are going to do the Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit, which is effectively going

to pay people at that point $500 per week up to two weeks. It's since been expanded to four weeks to stay home if they're not feeling well. And that becomes the federal response to the issue. But the problem here, and it doesn't really quite become super apparent to everyone until later on, is that the better way to deal with this would be at the provincial level, and the federal program is effectively kind of an imperfect second-best option to really dealing with this problem. Let's go through the reasons why people say that the federal program is this imperfect option here.

Like, what's wrong with it? Dean Allad, who's been an advocate on this issue, explained it to me this way, which is that if you have paid sick leave, if it's mandated, if it's a law and your employer is required to give it to you, you can wake up in the morning and if you're not feeling well, you can just decide to stay home for as many days as you are allowed under provincial law. The problem is with the Canadian recovery sickness benefit is it's not automatic like that. It has a very bureaucratic and delayed application process. It takes a long time to get money to the worker if they're even eligible. You have to apply for it. You have to, you know, navigate a website, send in an application. You have to meet the eligibility criteria, which is that you have to have missed 50% of work, at least 50% of work in a week.

And then you have to wait to find out that you're approved and then wait to get the money. And if you're someone who is, as we just talked about, if you're someone who's earning less than $25,000 a year, you maybe can't wait to find out whether you're going to get that money and then wait for that money to arrive. You're maybe budgeting on a day-to-day basis and you can't really deal with that. The other issue there is that if it's not mandated under provincial law, your employer isn't necessarily entitled to give you that time off. And so the Canadian Recovery Sickness Benefit may have the right sort of intent, but it has these flaws that make it harder for people to access it and harder for people to know that it's there. And so if you're someone who wakes up and you're not feeling well, you have to make a decision. Are you going to, you know,

see how it goes and go into work and try to tough it out? And, you know, hopefully you haven't got anything and hopefully it's not contagious. Or are you going to stay home and try to be extra cautious and then try to get the Canadian recovery sickness benefit? And for a lot of people, that's a really difficult decision to make, and it's necessarily going to lead to people going into work when really they'd be better off at home. I know another criticism of it is that $500 a week is actually less than what some people without sick leave benefits

would earn in a week. So maybe they wouldn't take it for that reason too. And this is exactly what Dr. Michael Warner was talking about with his patient in the ICU, that it's so tight for his patient to cover his rent, his food, his hydro, and other essential expenses that just one day off work without pay, you know, this uncertainty that you just described could mean him not being able to pay his rent that month, or him not being able to afford the Internet for his child to attend online learning. There is no wiggle room here to wait for a payment.

Yeah. And if the priority is keeping people at home, if the priority is not spreading a virus, then you want to take all of those ambiguities and all those choices out of the way. And you want it, in Dina Ladd's words, you want it to be seamless. You want people to be able to make the easy decision and just stay home. And that really wasn't what the federal program could offer. Okay, so here's one question for you. What's stopping the federal government from just making this program better, from making it seamless, fixing the problems that we just talked about? Why can't they just do that? Right.

So there are maybe ways that they could speed up the process. They could add money to it. But they are, it does seem that they are just simply running up against the limitations of the system and of jurisdiction. They can't mandate for this in individual provinces. That is down to federal provinces. They can regulate it in federally regulated workplaces. And they did change the law before the pandemic to allow for three paid sick days in federally regulated workplaces, but they can't do it in individual provinces. And so they're really running up against the limitations of their own systems and the constitution. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

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For example, in Saskatchewan, 285 physicians signed an open letter calling for this for essential workers in Newfoundland and Labrador. Unifor is calling for two weeks of paid sick leave for every worker during the pandemic. We're saying to these people, you are essential workers, go to work. Yet when they're sick, we don't take care of them. That in itself is a huge flaw in our system. In BC, the head of the Service Employees Union could not be more clear. She is saying this is what is missing in BC to protect workers. And in Ontario, of course, there has been tremendous, tremendous pressure for the government to move here. And take me through how Doug Ford has responded to these calls over time up until yesterday, up until Wednesday. So the initial response sort of is, look, the provinces don't need to do paid sick leave because this federal program exists.

There's paid sick leave from the federal government. And then the argument in Ontario from Doug Ford becomes, look, if we did our own thing, we'd be double dipping into people's pockets. We'd be duplicating a federal program. And in a way, the federal program, the CRSB, it became an excuse for the provinces to not do something better. So you had this imperfect program that wasn't really working, but it offered just enough of a fig leaf for provinces to go, well, look, the federal government is already doing this. We don't need to go any further. And the pressure builds and builds and builds. Ford has a pretty disastrous attempt to deal with the third wave and is under a lot of pressure and under a lot of criticism,

that the Ontario government really finally relents and says, OK, we'll do something on paid sick leave. Right. And I want to get to what they announced on Wednesday. But can you tell me briefly before about this? Like, I don't know, I found it a bit bizarre, the back and forth that they had with Ottawa this week. Yeah, so in the same news conference where Doug Ford comes out and apologizes and is very emotional about the third wave and about how his government is handling things. These decisions, they left a lot of people angry and upset. And for that, I'm sorry, and I sincerely apologize. He says, quote, we're going to come up with our own solution, and that it would be the best paid sick leave program in North America.

I also want to remind the people of Ontario, there's no other province in this entire country that have the program that we're going to be laying out. And then, like days after that, we now know, his government sent a letter to the federal government and said, basically, how about we just send you some money and you add that money to the federal program, and then that'll double the payments to Ontario recipients of the CRSB. So first of all, that's not quite our own solution. That's really just sort of piggybacking on to the federal solution. It might solve the problem of the federal program not offering enough money, but it doesn't deal with any of the issues around applications and, you know, mandating it in law and people having the confidence to know that it's there. And it gets a

bit in the weeds, but then there's even another question of whether the federal government could even, with their own systems and programs, really actually implement something like that particularly quickly because you'd have to effectively be implementing one CRSB in Ontario and then a different CRSB in every other province. So how does the federal government respond to this request by Ontario to essentially double down on the federal program? Yeah, so the federal response is essentially, you know, go, you need to legislate, you need to mandate employers to offer paid sick leave and get back to us when you do that. Provinces need to look at the way to deliver sick leave directly through employers, which the federal government can't do.

And the Ontario response initially on Tuesday was that they still wanted to talk to the federal government about this. And even Wednesday, they came out and said, we still want to talk to the federal government about this. But they don't, even after the federal government has seemingly said no to them, But they don't, even after the federal government has seemingly said no to them, they still seem reluctant up and until Wednesday to actually just finally bring forward paid sick leave. Right. And so in addition to saying that they still want to work with the federal government to add more money to the much criticized federal program, what else do they do on Wednesday? So they finally relent and say that they will do paid sick leave. I'm pleased to introduce the Ontario COVID-19 worker income protection benefit.

People will be entitled to take up to three days off. They will be paid during that time. Our action today means that if a warehouse worker is told to self-isolate, she can do so without losing her paycheck. And if a grocery store clerk needs to take time off to get vaccinated, they can get paid while doing so. And the provincial government will cover all of the expenses so businesses don't have to pay for it.

We want to ensure businesses survive this pandemic and that workers have jobs to come back to. That is why employers will be reimbursed for what they pay out up to $200 a day for three days. It is a response to the demand for paid sick leave. It does in a way match what Prince Edward Island had ended up doing, bumping their paid sick leave up to three days. But it doesn't quite fully answer what people had been looking for because people had been saying, look, you need paid sick leave, but it needs to be something like 10 days. Because if you're looking at a period where people need to be isolating for as much as 14 days, then you need to cover two full work weeks.

Right. I mean, I also saw some criticisms today that as well that it ends in September, though there were some suggestions that it could be extended. And then also that this is like essentially a bit of a day late and a dollar short. Right. Yeah. So the government comes the Ontario government says, you know, this is this is a game changer. It will save lives. But that, you know, we're at month 14 of this pandemic. And the question I think then has to be asked, well, this will save lives now. Why didn't you do it six months ago? Why didn't you do it a year ago? And the response will naturally be, well, the federal program was there, and we were hoping the federal government would improve it. And so you really get into this weird spot where the federal government stepped in with an imperfect policy. It wasn't enough, but it was just enough to give the provinces an excuse to not

do more. And now we're at, you know, April 2021. And we're just now moving forward on this in a real way that provinces actually have paid sick leave. Right. And I want to be fair here, too. We're talking about Ontario a lot. But again, you know, the only other two provinces with mandated paid sick days are PEI in Quebec with just a few days as well. And, you know, Alberta, no mandated paid sick days. Up until this week, too, there were no mandated paid sick days in BC. And Premier John Horgan also seems to have caved to tremendous public pressure there, although he's also been critical of the federal government, right? We raised the issues with the federal government. We were disappointed to see no progress. And

therefore, we've gone back to the shelf and taken the programs that we were working on here in British Columbia. And we're trying to get those up to speed to fill the gaps at the federal level. Yeah. So John Horgan, who has said, and Trudeau has credited him too, with raising this issue amongst the first ministers, you know, in the phone calls between the premiers and the prime minister. You know, Horgan has given this credit for raising paid sick leave early, but his response still now is like sort of, gee, that federal program really wasn't very good.

They should have done better. And much as that might be true, provincial law and provincial labor laws are within John Horgan's control. He can change them. And if he thought the federal program wasn't enough, he could have changed it months ago. Right. And just to be clear, you know, you mentioned that the program that B program that BC announced this week that they're putting in place is supposed to be pertinent. But other than that, we don't actually have any other real details, right? No, we don't know. The BC government has been talking about making changes or filling the gaps since December. And John Horgan implied this week that they had plans that were maybe on the shelf, but we don't really know what they're

actually going to end up doing. I know that work was done through the summer to bring forward a provincial plan, and we're looking at how we can implement that in a seamless way without putting more burden on business at a time when business can least afford it. You know, Aaron, I think you sort of alluded to this at the top of the conversation when we were talking about Ontario, but why is it that all of these provinces have been so reluctant to put in paid sick days in general, but also certainly during the pandemic? You can sort of fairly speculate a couple reasons. One is businesses won't love this. They won't be interested in extra costs if they have to pay it.

And so they will demand either that you don't put paid sick leave in or that if you do do it, you pick up the bill. And depending on how big a provincial government goes, if it's picking up the cost, it could be pretty expensive. The other piece of this is, and I think you see it in what the Ontario government did by making theirs temporary and saying from the start that it's temporary, is that once you've put in a benefit, once you've put in an allowance,

it can be very hard to take it back. You're going to face criticism when you take it back and people go, well, wait a minute, you said this was in for the pandemic, but shouldn't people have three days of paid sick leave normally? And I suspect those two things, in combination with the excuse that the federal program provided, are really what kept the provinces from moving forward more aggressively until now. Can I ask you something that I found a bit puzzling?

Why haven't the provinces just mandated employers to pay the sick days, then taken the money from the feds to pay those employers back instead of telling people to use this federal system? What am I missing here? Yeah, to be honest, I don't know what you're missing, and I don't think you're missing anything. If you were given a time machine and allowed to go back six or eight months, it seems like that would be the optimum solution here, is the province's mandate paid sick leave and then

the federal government or the provincial government or some combination thereof step in and provide funding to help businesses some of which are you know genuinely struggling during this time cover those costs there are sort of precedents for this too like the the federal government very early on in this pandemic tried to help with commercial rent relief. And the problem they ran into there, they conceded later, was that there was no, each province didn't then implement a ban on eviction. And so without the ban on eviction, you know, offering commercial rent relief to landlords didn't have as much impact because you could still evict people if you really wanted to. And that, I think,

is sort of the model here where if the provincial government and the federal government had worked together, they might have gotten to a much better program eight, nine months ago. Right. And I think for a lot of people listening, this will probably feel really frustrating and also incredibly sad to think about the very real consequences of this. Yes, what's being debated, what the two levels of government are going back and forth over is a measure that could have helped people stay home and avoid a potentially deadly virus. And that is the most frustrating thing about all of the drama over the last week and all of this debate over the last six months to of this debate over the last

six months to a year. Okay. Aaron, thank you. Thank you. All right. That is all for today. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner. We'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.