Home > Economy/Employment > Debates
  • Debates

    Labour leader says Pay Equity Act should also address income disparity in minorities, disabled

    posted November 2, 2018 / No Comments

    … research shows that visible minorities – the term Statscan uses – earn almost 20 per cent less, on average, than Canadians who are not visible minorities. That gap widens further for women of colour, who earned, on average, 70 per cent of what a man who is not a visible minority earned… research considered factors such as education, experience and hours worked. “After controlling for all characteristics that may drive earning gaps, we still see some gaps that then we can say that’s discrimination”…

  • Debates

    Doug Ford government spins fake news to ditch minimum wage hike

    posted October 31, 2018 / No Comments

    After two years of public consultations, special advisors leading “the largest review of Ontario’s labour laws conducted in decades” concluded in the 400-page Changing Workplaces Review report “that there are too many people in too many workplaces who do not receive their basic rights.” … for business lobbies to now say there has been no input and that Bill 148 is “too much too soon” is disingenuous… In fact, some of the changes… were modified by the business community.”

  • Debates

    No sign minimum wage hike was ‘job killer’ Doug Ford says it was

    posted October 25, 2018 / No Comments

    Now that Premier Doug Ford’s government is scrapping nearly every change the Liberals made to the employment laws and freezing the minimum wage until October 2020, it’s time to assess whether the claims that it’s killing jobs and devastating the economy are true. The Ontario Chamber of Commerce predicted (in what it called an independent economic analysis) that the reforms would put 185,000 jobs at risk. The fact is Ontario’s unemployment rate over the past year is as good as it has been this century.

  • Debates

    Ontario is open for business, but on the back of vulnerable workers

    posted October 24, 2018 / No Comments

    … the Tories are cancelling a $1 increase in the minimum hourly wage scheduled for Jan. 1, 2019, eliminating two paid sick days for workers, and dropping the requirement that employers pay part-time and casual staff at the same rate as full-time workers doing the same job. The government is also repealing measures that would have given employees the right to request a change to their schedule or work location, and to be paid for three hours of work if a scheduled shift is cancelled without 48 hours’ notice. Workers will also lose the right to refuse to work on days they weren’t scheduled to.

  • Debates

    Minimum wage hikes help reduce income inequality, report shows

    posted October 24, 2018 / No Comments

    “Minimum wage increases in most Canadian provinces from the mid-2000s onwards have had a significant impact on wage growth at the lower end of the distribution, at both the national and provincial levels,”… The report also found that while wage gains for women have exceeded those for men since 1997, there remains a “considerable gap” in the wages paid for men and women.

  • Debates

    The secret world of corporate tax avoidance

    posted October 18, 2018 / No Comments

    … do large Canadian corporations avoid billions of dollars of taxes each year? You bet they do. And other taxpayers – you and I – have to ante up the shortfall. Canadian tax rules are in desperate need of repair. If the federal Department of Finance is not up to the task, the government should appoint a fair-minded and non-partisan group of tax experts to do the work.

  • Debates

    Will Canadians accept a carbon tax?

    posted October 18, 2018 / No Comments

    … with Canadians expressing a desire for government leadership, a substantial amount of concern about climate change, and moderate support across much of the country for a carbon price, the time may be right for bold action along the lines of the national carbon tax currently under discussion. No policy will be popular with all Canadians, but the data point to a reasonable chance that a carbon tax will be acceptable to the majority.

  • Debates

    Approaching carbon tax one reason now is a good time for broad-based tax reform

    posted October 16, 2018 / No Comments

    … what if the carbon tax was implemented in tandem with broad-based tax reform? Could the two reinforce each other? Not only would there be that much more in the way of revenues with which to make meaningful cuts in corporate and personal tax rates, but the cuts might then be deep enough to make possible a more radical reform of the tax code than might otherwise be attempted. Sometimes the best policy is also the most practical.

  • Debates

    Protesters urge Ford to keep worker protections, minimum wage bump in place

    posted October 16, 2018 / No Comments

    In addition to increasing the province’s minimum wage, Bill 148 provided two paid, job-protected emergency leave days for all workers, increased holiday entitlement, mandated equal pay for casual and part-time workers doing the same job as full-time employees, enshrined, improved scheduling protections and boosted protections for temp agency workers… About one-third of Ontario’s workforce are vulnerable workers in low-wage, precarious employment… “Our message is, Premier Ford, do the right thing.”

  • Hot! Debates

    Stephen Harper comes across as banal in effort to claim mantle of populism

    posted October 11, 2018 / No Comments

    … if the populist is famously “for the people,” it invites the question of who is against — the Them that is supposedly menacing Us. The populist is never short of Thems: elites, foreigners, racial minorities, “globalists” — or in Harper’s (borrowed) formulation, the cosmopolitan “Anywheres” who owe no allegiance to nation-states, move between homes in New York, London and Singapore, and hanker after a world without borders… whom Harper is convinced now control “all the main traditional political parties.”

Older posts →