The 50-year-old New Democrat, who represents Davenport, never had a permanent, full-time job until he was elected two years ago. As a singer-songwriter, he had no income between gigs, no employment insurance (EI) and no workplace benefits. He didn’t even dream of a pension.
Half of Toronto’s workers — artists, musicians, consultants, university lecturers, entrepreneurs, freelance writers, web designers, waiters, taxi drivers, roofers, office cleaners and interns — live that way, Cash points out. Yet this reality is never discussed in the House of Commons. MPs behave as if the vast majority of Canadians had permanent stable jobs.
Cash knows one MP can’t turn the tide. But he hopes to get Parliament to at least acknowledge that precarious employment is becoming the new normal in urban Canada. Before the House rises on June 21, he will table a private member’s bill sketching out a national urban workers’ strategy. It will contain measures designed to protect Canadians working part-time, contract-to-contract, casually or in any other makeshift arrangement.
“I don’t expect it to pass,” he said candidly in an interview. “But we’ve got to get this on the agenda.”
One of the reasons Cash ran for office in 2011 was to give insecure urban workers a voice in Parliament. “I don’t know what the answers are right now, but we’re letting people hang out to dry,” he said at the time. “You can call it the middle class being squeezed out. You can call it the gap between the rich and the poor. But essentially what it is, is people are getting left behind.”
He still doesn’t have all the answers. But he has enough — and enough of an understanding of Parliament — to start converting his objective into legislative action. His bill will call for expanded access to EI (65 per cent of unemployed workers are now excluded); propose strict rules against laying off workers and hiring them back as “independent contractors”; prescribe a crackdown on employers who exploit unpaid interns; recommend improvements to the Canada Pension Plan and suggest income averaging for vulnerable workers, which would help them to survive lean spells.
He tested these ideas on his constituents in a town-hall meeting last month. The restaurant was packed. The reception was largely positive. But what was most striking was the wide range of occupations, income levels and ethnic backgrounds in the room. “For the first time, working people from different social groups have started to come together,” he said.
It is unlikely that Prime Minister Stephen Harper will respond to their anxiety. His human resources minister, Diane Finley, thinks EI should be an unpleasant last resort. “We do not want to make it lucrative for them (the unemployed) to stay home and get paid for it,” she toldhttp://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId=5627457&Language=EHis finance minister, Jim Flaherty, has consistently rebuffed calls to modernize EI.
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is concerned about the proportion of families living paycheque-to-paycheque. He has promised relief, but has no plan. “I will begin and spend and end every day thinking and working to solve this problem.”
NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair addressed the issue in a speech to the Economic Club of Canada last month. “Today modern urban workers in cities like Toronto are struggling like never before,” he said. “But together, we can build a future for Toronto — and for all Canadian cities — that will create opportunity and prosperity, not just for a few of us but for each and every one of us.”
The challenge is not educating the electorate, Cash said. Voters get it. They’re living it every day.
It’s Parliament that needs a wake-up call.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Carol Goar
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