SHARE AND SHARE ALIKE
Has The National’s job-share sparked a federal trend?
Is it just a coincidence that two of our national institutions — the CBC and federal cabinet — have become big fans of jobsharing? The CBC announced this summer that the next anchor of The National would be four people: Ian Hanomansing, Adrienne Arsenault, Rosemary Barton and Andrew Chang.
Then this week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau split responsibility for Indigenous affairs between two ministers: Carolyn Bennett and Jane Philpott. Actually, you could stretch that to three ministers, if you include Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould’s new job of overseeing a cabinet working group on Indigenous matters.
What’s remarkable about these arrangements is that they are happening in politics and journalism — career fields where competition and star culture have tended to be rewarded more than team spirit and collaboration.
Sure, both vocations require people to work in teams and play well with others, at least behind the scenes. But the people in the highest ranks of politics and journalism, whether ministers or TV anchors, usually stand alone atop their fiercely guarded empires. An ability to share is not a prerequisite for career advancement.
Then again, the proposed work-sharing in cabinet and at The National isn’t exactly the type we’ve been seeing in the private sector over the past few decades.
The idea is usually defined as an arrangement in which two or more people hold responsibility for one full-time position. Those responsibilities can be divided up by time (two people working half a week each) or by distributing duties among the job sharers. It’s been an increasingly popular way for women to transition back to the workforce after maternity leave, for instance, or a way for older workers to phase their way into retirement.
It’s also a handy way to spread the work around during economic downturns. The 2016 federal budget — the first by Trudeau’s government — expanded Canada’s work-sharing program for people in the commodities sector, allowing them to work part time but claim benefits to make up for the gap in their income for as long as 76 weeks in some cases.
All these types of job sharing are about shrinking work, either because of employee preference or economic conditions.
But the job-sharing we’re going to be seeing at the CBC or Indigenous affairs governance is for exactly the opposite reason — because the work in question has become too large. In both, the sharing was announced as a modernization measure; a welcome-tothe-21st-century kind of innovation.
The news cycle is now moving too quickly and too globally to be handled by one mere national anchor, CBC told us a few weeks ago. Similarly, Indigenous matters are now just too huge and too important to be handled by one department, the government told us this week.
“The level of the ambition of this government cannot be achieved by existing, colonial structures,” said the backgrounder information sheet distributed with the cabinet-change announcements this week.
What remains to be seen, however, is whether the culture of politics or journalism can change to match the expanded thinking behind the job-sharing arrangements. It’s still mostly uncharted territory in the upper reaches of politics and journalism.
One political party — the Greens in the United Kingdom — is currently experimenting with job sharing at the leadership level. Carolyn Lucas and Jonathan Bartley are co-leaders of the Green Party in the U.K. Only Lucas sits in the Commons; Bartley didn’t even run in the election earlier this year. Their leadership-sharing deal, which is only a year old, was billed as a bold, pioneering new step in building a new balance into politics.
In their first speech after being elected co-leaders last September, Bartley and Lucas said they would be “demonstrating both the power of working together and the importance of striking a healthy balance between work and family and other commitments.”
Perhaps so, but not too many parties seem to be following that lead. New Conservative leader Andrew Scheer didn’t set up many shared titles when he announced his roster of critic responsibilities this week. Canada’s New Democrats are not entertaining the idea of splitting leadership duties between Niki Ashton (expecting twins soon after the vote in October) and any of her fellow candidates for the job.
It will be interesting to check back in with CBC and the cabinet a year from now or even sooner, to see how the whole job-sharing thing is working out. Will all the anchors share the job and the glory equally? Will Bennett, Philpott and Wilson-Raybould have figured out a way to fairly handle, among themselves, the massive expectations that this government keeps investing in reconciliation with Indigenous people?
Sharing may be something we teach to children in school. But in the highly competitive worlds of politics and the media, sharing jobs — as well as glory and blame — will need to be taught, too. sdelacourt@bell.net