A year after the first COVID-19 case in Canada and 10 months into a full blown pandemic, Premier Doug Ford has finally started to advance his thinking on paid sick days.
He has come around to seeing the need for workers to be paid when they have to stay home in a pandemic and that the sickness benefit Ottawa rolled out is not achieving that aim.
“It needs to be changed,” Ford said of the federal program.
That was an important step for him last week. This week he needs to take another step forward.
Ford still thinks paid sick days have nothing to do with him — it’s up to Ottawa, he says, to take care of this problem. And there he’s still entirely wrong.
The federal government stepped into the gaping hole left by Ontario and other provinces with a temporary sickness benefit of $500 a week for up to two weeks for those who don’t have workplace-based paid sick days and need to stay home because they have contracted COVID-19 or need to isolate.
The Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit isn’t working well. It has delivered benefits to just over 337,000 people when it was expected to reach nearly 5 million workers.
The benefit could be improved by enriching the payments so they match workers’ wages, delivering benefits more quickly and making it possible to use a couple days at a time so people can take time off to get a COVID test and wait for the results.
But it’s still the wrong answer to the problem. Labour laws and standards, but for a handful of federally regulated industries, are a provincial responsibility.
The real problem is that provinces, including Ontario, have not kept up with those responsibilities in the face of a changing workforce. They have left workers, especially those in the gig economy and low-wage industries, at the mercy of companies who are predisposed to cut all the corners they can when it comes to providing benefits to workers.
That’s why only about 40 per cent of Canadian workers have access to paid sick leave and that figure drops down to as low as 10 per cent for low-wage workers; the very workers who can’t work from home in a pandemic.
What’s needed is provincial legislation mandating paid sick days for all workers. It’s Ford and his fellow premiers who need to step up when it comes to paid sick days in a pandemic and in ordinary times for that matter.
If Ford and his Labour Minister Monte McNaughton fall ill they don’t need to worry about what that means for their family finances. They’ll get paid whether they’re at work, at home in bed sick or sitting on the couch waiting for the results of a COVID test.
Why do they think hundreds of thousands of workers in Ontario deserve so much less than that?
As Mary Leonard, a 61-year-old grocery cashier, says: “You need to come to my workplace … You need to walk in my shoes and everybody else like me.”
With the added dangers of a new variant of COVID-19 that spreads much more easily, Ontario must ensure that workers who are sick, or think they might be, have the paid days they need to do the right thing and stay home.
When the federal sickness benefit was being negotiated last summer Ford’s views were clear and utterly wrong. “I don’t support it,” he said then.
In light of where he started, his recent realization that paid sick days are in fact needed and that the federal program isn’t working is a decent leap forward.
Ford needs to keep going and if not embrace, at least accept, the province’s necessary role in ensuring all workers have the paid sick days they need.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2021/01/25/ontario-should-mandate-paid-sick-days-for-all-workers.html
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