Repealing Bill 148 doesn’t help workers

Re Ford says he’s getting rid of labour reforms, Oct. 3 It should come as no surprise that Rocco Rossi, the president and CEO of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce and former PC candidate in the 2011 Ontario election, is full of praise for the Ford government’s plan to repeal Bill 148.

Mr. Rossi refers to the consequences of Bill 148 that have forced his members “to decrease product offerings and increase the price of products being sold, hire fewer employees, reduce services and hours of operation, cut back on employee benefits and halt capital investment.”

I wonder if Mr. Rossi got this information from surveying the 60,000 members in the OCC, an organization that represents only a fraction of the 389,000 businesses that operate in Ontario.

No doubt some businesses have reacted in the way that Mr. Rossi states. However, his claims seem to be contradicted by the research conducted by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, before Bill 148 was implemented, which found that 60 per cent of businesses were not planning to reduce overall staffing hours and 61 per cent had already begun to proactively raise their employees’ wages to ease the financial transition. Only 18 per cent were plan- ning to reduce employee benefits.

It is further contradicted by polling data from Campaign Research, which, in June 2017, found that 62 per cent of small- and medium-sized business owners supported a $15 or higher minimum wage. Tim Heffernan, Toronto

I think the Ford government’s plan for job creation is very short-sighted. The repeal of Bill 148 and the cancellation of the minimum wage increase set for January 2019 is a step. But why not take a leap? Reduce the minimum wage to 50 cents a day, remove all labour protections and just sit back and watch hundreds of thousands of jobs start rolling into Ontario from Bangladesh, China and Vietnam.

There’ll be no excuse for not having a job in our Ontario. Duff Sprague, Cobourg.

If Mr. Ford intends to repeal everything in Bill 148 that would improve the lives of so many workers compelled to work two or three jobs to stay afloat, exactly WHO are these people he is for? It is not for these workers, apparently. Margaret Perrault, North Bay