The world of work has changed. Workers' rights, both individual and collective, have deteriorated; high-quality jobs have been replaced by precarious and part-time work with few benefits and no pensions; and large corporations prey on small businesses and workers.

Canada should:

• Nationalize or take a controlling interest in any strategic manufacturing firm in Canada that can be repurposed in a green and socially relevant manner, beginning with the GM plant in Oshawa to produce made-in-Canada electric vehicles.
• Identify other firms that would serve Canadian society better in public hands, beginning with natural monopolies such as transport, communications, energy and resources, and pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, and begin the process of taking them into public or some other socially responsible form of ownership.
• Ensure the transformation of Canada’s financial sector on the model of public utility banking, focused on providing long-term ‘patient’ capital for financing production, nationally and locally, rather than short-term ‘fickle’ capital for speculation.
• End the practice of bailing out speculating firms, a practice that has created too many moral hazards.
• Work to reduce incomes deriving from ownership alone, and increase incomes from effort. This will also vastly increase income equality in Canada.
• Ensure that all publicly-owned firms are in the forefront of R&D, keeping the Canadian economy on the technological frontier in many fields.
• Impose a reclamation tax on all polluting and climate-warming enterprises, and use the proceeds to clean up that pollution and reduce global warming. This will generate a reclamation jobs boom.

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Canada should:

• Ensure that workplace health and safety, which were always vitally important and have become more so in the context of the pandemic, are improved by:
  • Ensuring vigorous enforcement of laws providing for criminal and civil liability for corporate executives who create unsafe working conditions that result in serious injury and death. Currently, these laws are almost never enforced.
  • Mandating regular inspections and monitoring of workplaces by the Ministry of Labour, with confidential worker input. 
• Ensure that, for those unable to work due to illness or injury, insurance benefits are made available without delay.
• Ensure that employees are not be forced to return to work after any public health emergency without adequate safety arrangements for them and their families.

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Canada should:

• Enact or amend relevant legislation to require that at least one quarter of the members of the boards of the following sorts of corporations be elected by employees of the corporation:
  1. Crown Corporations
  2. Canada Business Corporations Act (CBCA) corporations
  3. Non-CBCA corporations that wish to be eligible for contracts from the Federal government.
• Create a national business school curriculum for worker-owned cooperatives and collectives; or incorporate such instruction in existing technical institutes and colleges.
• Facilitate worker buyouts and cooperative or collective forms of ownership of existing or new firms, including by ensuring tax treatment on par or better than privately owned firms and corporations.  
• Require all sales of interests in Canadian corporations beyond a threshold size to be permitted only by Parliament after due investigation. Prohibit reverse takeovers that cross the Canadian border.

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Canada should:

• Enshrine a federal national living wage into law. It will be set initially at $20/hour, to be achieved within 2 years, for all federal government bodies, Crown corporations, federally regulated industries and all corporations that do business with them. It will be indexed to inflation and reviewed periodically by the National Labour Commission. The adoption of a living wage by provincial governments, for employees not covered by the federal national living wage, will be encouraged by instituting federal transfers to the provinces for this purpose on the model of the health transfers through which uniformity in health care is achieved nationally.
• Adopt legislation requiring all business entities to maintain a compensation ratio no greater than 10:1 between executives and employees.
• Indigenous peoples suffer one of the highest unemployment rates. To address indigenous unemployment, Canada should:
  • Assist in developing the economy of indigenous nations sustainably, based on the mix between traditional means of livelihood and modern industry chosen by the indigenous community concerned.
  • Provide for urban indigenous people special programmes to facilitate their full participation in the economy through a combination of public and private initiatives, with indigenous representation on the governing boards thereof.
• Amend federal bankruptcy legislation to give workers’ claims during bankruptcy, the highest priority among claims on the firm’s assets, including priority over preferred creditors.  
• Initiate a transition from the present inequitable and far-from-universal patchwork of pensions to a radically reformed Canada Pensions Plan that includes every person above retirement age and reduces its reliance on socially and morally questionable financial and other investments, both in Canada and abroad. It is critical that this be done without raising workers’ contributions. Such a universal scheme will counter arguments against pensions that understandably arise from those without pensions. Universal pensions will be automatically transferable. We will set up a national commission to determine the Federal and provincial governments’ roles in them and to ensure equity and relative equality in pension payments.
• Ensure legal safeguards to provide equal opportunities for all Canadians regardless of ethnicity, race, culture, religion or political persuasion. It must be illegal to discriminate.
• Establish a commission to look into how to distribute work and its rewards more broadly by reducing working time without loss of access to a liveable income. This will serve to reduce unemployment, increase leisure for autonomous activity and continue the historic trend toward translating increases in productivity into reduction of labour time. This trend operated throughout the history of capitalism before being interrupted in recent decades.  We will encourage job-sharing.
• For those not covered by the work and income measures proposed so far, we propose a guaranteed liveable income, operated through the tax system and income-tested. (We support current Green Party policy calling for a universal basic income for all. Research suggests, however, that while this should continue to be a long-term goal, our approach, which blends many measures, is more politically and economically feasible and is urgently needed as part of the pandemic recovery plan.)
• Establish a national task force aimed at reducing the workweek and stress in workplaces.
• Create a Labour Redeployment Commission to retrain and redeploy workers made redundant by technological and economic development or change. It should work in close cooperation with vocational or other post-secondary educational institutions.
• Ensure that the Department of Labour acts as an advocate, guarantor and protector of workers’ rights where necessary against employers’ organizations and the rest of government.

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Canada should:

• Enshrine into law a guarantee of workers’ rights to bargain collectively, whether in an existing or new general or industrial union (i.e., not a company union) capable of bargaining with similarly organized employers.
• Ensure that the law makes certification easy to ensure long-term and stable relationships between workers and those who represent their interests. This will be accompanied by stronger legislation on the right to fair representation in the workplace.
• Provide all temporary migrant workers a pathway to permanent residency, legally ensure their right to bargain collectively through existing unions and by forming new unions in conformity with the above points.
• Enact legislation to ensure that a simple majority of workers suffices for certification. Interruptions to this process simply provide opportunities for employers to intimidate workers and undermine the will of the workforce.
• Adopt legislation banning the use of replacement workers during strikes and lockouts.
• Collaborate with unions to appoint and fund a National Labour Commission. It should be composed exclusively of unions’ representatives and charged with keeping track of important changes in the world of work and proposing revisions to relevant federal and provincial law and regulation concerning topics such as the following every two years:
  • the Labour Code,
  • minimum wages,
  • working from home,
  • protection workers from present and future pandemics or epidemics and other health threats,
  • health and safety procedures generally,
  • pension contributions,
  • anti-discrimination practices,
  • gig economy and precarious work.
• Provide that, after continuous employment, whether temporary or part-time, of one year, workers should be afforded the same legal rights as full-time employees, in particular regarding protection against dismissal.
• A new Department of Labour must be established to provide credible support for the non-unionized by advocating and providing resources for unionization. It should target for unionization sectors where bad pay and working conditions have become a norm.

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