Premier oughta put his money where his mouth is
We cannot afford to refuse workers minimal sick pay.
But we are also paying a price for freezing their minimum hourly pay.
Such is the double jeopardy workers now face, made worse by the singular peril of COVID-19. All thanks to Premier Doug Ford — with no small thanks to the voters of Ontario who handed him a majority government in mid-2018, empowering him to do as he promised.
In mid-pandemic, the clamour is growing for the premier to provide paid days off for those afflicted by the virus. But sick pay is not the only casualty of the ideology of this Progressive Conservative government.
Well before Ford closed his mind to sick days, he set his mind to shutting down a scheduled increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour. You didn’t need to read his mind to know what Ford had up his sleeve.
Say what you will about the premier, he said it all aloud, loud and clear, on the campaign trail. He made no secret of it, harboured no hidden agenda, just had a hit list.
And so when people call on Ford to do the right thing, they are coming late to the parade. The more precise demand is that he undo the damage he inflicted at the outset — enabled and empowered by voters who closed their eyes to his stated vision.
We did it to ourselves. Only we can undo it — heal thyselves — by demanding that he halt the self-inflicted harm.
Today there is a societal consensus that Ford blundered by rolling back the two paid sick days — no medical note required — put in place by thenpremier Kathleen Wynne before the last election. Despite all the anti-Wynne pathology and political ideology, our practical reality is undeniable: A sick worker will only sicken more workers and more customers. Not to mention infecting more health-care workers and fellow patients if forced to get a medical note.
As COVID-19 exposed the full folly of Ford’s mistake, he slowly adapted — suspending the right of employers to demand medical notes or fire workers who booked off sick. But he never fully restored the paid days off, nor expanded them to keep workers whole on the daily payroll, instead relying on a temporary federal pandemic program that provides a pittance after the fact.
All that said, sick pay is only the half of it, because Ford couldn’t stop talking down increases to the minimum wage: the hourly rate jumped from $11.40 to $14 on Jan. 1, 2018, and would rise again to $15 hourly the next year.
When Ford won power, he not only cancelled the planned increase as promised, but froze the hourly wage at $14 for 31 months — despite strong economic growth and record-low unemployment at the time. After two-and-a-half years, it went up a paltry 25 cents to catch up for inflation, but all these months later it’s time to recover the lost ground as we prepare for a post-pandemic economy.
Yes, small business is hurting more than ever, but so are the core workers society never much cared about until COVID-19 opened our eyes.
And the world has changed in other ways.
When Ontario’s former Liberal government embraced the goal of a $15 minimum wage, Alberta’s NDP had already paved the way, and progressive American cities were already way out in front. Ford looked the other way, winning the vote with a populist campaign that promised, “Ontario is open for business” — even if closedminded about workers.
Back then, Donald Trump was promising to Make American Great Again. Now, Joe Biden is in the White House promising a $15 federal minimum wage — in U.S. dollars, equivalent to about $19 in Canadian funds (closer to $20 an hour before our dollar got stronger).
Can we Canadians keep up with our American friends, we who look down on their ideological blinkers about medicare? It’s not just Biden’s Democratic party, but the eternally Republican state of Florida — hardly foreign turf for Canadians — that has also embraced a $15 hourly wage, thanks to a November referendum that passed handily.
Quite apart from the politics, the economics of a higher minimum wage are increasingly backed by empirical evidence that belies the scary rhetoric from Ford’s business backers, big and small. When big U.S. cities introduced regional wage increases, economic studies demonstrated no negative effects compared to neighbouring jurisdictions where the rate didn’t change.
That’s why the vast majority of Canadian economists, like their American counterparts, support a higher minimum wage that puts more money into the hands of those living paycheque to paycheque, knowing their spending will ripple through the economy. In fact, when Ontario raised its hourly rate to $14, our economic growth remained strong and unemployment continued to drop — the opposite of what scaremongering bank economists had predicted.
But this is about more than economics. It’s also about politics and the pandemic.
Today, more Ontarians value the work of previously undervalued and underpaid workers in the retail and health-care sectors — the very people our premier keeps citing as heroes, core to our economy. After all this lost time, Ford must do the right thing — undoing his right-wing sting — by putting both sick pay and minimum pay on the critical list.