Good morning, everybody. I’m not usually on House duty Monday morning, but it’s always a pleasure to come in and talk about any bill that has to do with workers. We’re debating this morning Bill 149, which is a schedule of a variety of bills, and frankly, Speaker, there’s a couple of pretty substantial flaws in this bill. During debate last time, I talked very clearly about the support for the presumptive WSIB coverage for urban firefighters. I think that’s the highlight of this bill. The rest of the bill is a little bit downhill from there.

I think, as well, it’s good to underscore that the Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act is a bit of a misnomer. It should really be called the “digital app company rights act.” Basically what it does is it allows these billion-dollar companies—the Ubers, the Lyfts, the food delivery services that people work by their phones—to misclassify workers as independent contractors. And by doing this, they end up basically working for 12 to 14 hours a day and making less than minimum wage—and a lot less; about $7 or $6-something an hour, and $2-something if you take away what it costs them for their expenses on their vehicles. It’s a really terrible idea here. When you think, at the end of the day, that one of the data we’ve got here is $6.37 an hour for somebody working for a company that’s making billions of dollars a year, it’s a slap in the face to the workers of Ontario, Speaker—just a slap in the face to these workers.

The Conservative government shouldn’t be enshrining this right and this ability. What they say in DPWRA is that you can make a complaint. That’s what they’re flagging, that you could file a complaint, but also, in the Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act, the company has the right to misclassify you. So you could make a complaint, but nothing will happen. No one’s listening; no one will pick up the phone, or they’ll pick up the phone and then say, “Yes, that’s right. That’s what you’re entitled to.” So that’s one of the biggest flaws in this bill: What it’s going to do to these workers who work for these app companies.

And we know, Speaker, that more and more workers are working these gig jobs, this precarious work. When I graduated a million years ago, it was the first time we had this recession and there were all these short-term contracts. I remember that my parents were very confused and my friends’ parents were very confused because they said once you graduate from college or university, you get a job and you have a career. And there were these little piecemeal things. This has become the norm for so many people in our province—that you’re on these short-term contracts, that you’re a gig worker, that you’re going to be living with several roommates for what feels like the rest of your life. That’s the frustration that we’re seeing. Instead of helping these people, helping them get ahead, helping them ensure that they make at least minimum wage, what this schedule of this act does is it enshrines the ability for billion-dollar companies to underpay their workers, underpay them less than minimum wage. That’s a slap in the face to those workers.

I want to move on to other things in this bill. I want to talk about pay transparency. So in the bill, they talk about pay transparency. We, in fact, didn’t even have to have this as part of the bill, as a schedule. This was already an existing bill. The idea for this pay transparency was to close the gender wage gap so we have clarity about what people were making. So you can find out if indeed the men in your workplace were making more than the women in the workplace, people could understand what the pay was.

So in 2018, there was the Pay Transparency Act that had been passed by the previous Liberal government, just before the election. It was supposed to come into effect in November 2018. This is a little frustrating, I think, for a lot of people, when a sitting government, prior to an election, passes something that workers would like to have, but schedules it to be passed only if they’re re-elected, only in the future. So this went into limbo. Instead of clawing it back the way the Conservatives did with paid sick days and the other benefits that were passed for workers, instead of passing a bill to remove this, basically what they did, the Conservative government, is they amended it so that it would come into effect on an undefined date, proclaimed by government. So, basically, they took it and put it on a shelf. It was going to sit there probably indefinitely.

They may argue, Speaker, that, well, this is them bringing it back, but this is a very watered down version of this bill. So where the original one would actually have real pay transparency, this one is one of the weakest pay transparency laws in Canada. In fact, you can meet the definition of this schedule simply by saying that pay ranges anywhere from $1 to $1 million. Now, I don’t think unscrupulous companies are going to do that, but it isn’t true pay transparency. So all the stakeholders who previously came forward and talked about why pay transparency is so important, all of the people of Ontario who spoke about the need for this—civil rights groups and women’s groups who spoke about how important this was—all of that has been washed aside as a checkbox.

And as I said before, there’s a disturbing trend with the Conservative government that a lot of this becomes headlines; it’s about fluff and photo ops—pay transparency. The number of people who came to deputations where I had to explain to them that this was not the bill that they had championed in the past, that this was a watered down, lesser version, of what already existed. It was difficult for me, as I was breaking people’s hearts. They thought the thing they were fighting for since before 2018 was finally coming true. The Conservative government was finally listening to them, and I had to tell them, “No, it’s not at all what you’re getting. What you’re getting here is the title. You’re going to get the exact same title, but none of the teeth”—all sizzle, no steak. That’s a disturbing trend.

So in the Checklist for True Pay Transparency from the Ontario Equal Pay Coalition—I want to give them proper credit—what to look for in pay transparency legislation, these are all yes or no questions: “Is there a clear purpose statement linking pay transparency to the elimination of discrimination in pay?” That doesn’t apply here.

“Does the law apply to both private sector and public sector employers?

“Does the law apply to all employers with 10+ workers to ensure it is consistent with the Ontario Pay Equity Act?

“Does the law apply to require pay transparency for all jobs at all income levels in the workplace?

“Does the law require an annual report to the Ministry of Labour detailing wage structure, gender pay gaps, gender distribution across income levels, and gender distribution by job security?” This schedule doesn’t do that at all.

“Does the law require the employers’ annual pay transparency reports be publicly posted and accessible on a government website?” It doesn’t require that at all.

Like I said earlier, Speaker, if you really want to be in compliance, all you have to do is say that the pay range for this position is between $1 an hour and $1 million an hour. I absolutely don’t think that companies are going to do that—that would actually make the paper, I think, if they did. But you could very clearly put a range that has a gap of $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 within that range. All you’re doing, really, is following the legislation, but not the spirit of the legislation, and by doing that, you’re not helping people get ahead in life. You’re not helping close the gender wage gap at all. You’re actually allowing people to say, “Yes, there’s a wage gap. We’re not going to tell you who gets what, but there’s a $20,000 or $30,000 gap between different employees.”

I’m going to read a quote from the Equal Pay Coalition on this:

“Pay transparency laws can be drafted and provide weaker or stronger protections.

“Ontario’s statements to date indicate its proposed law would be one of the weakest pay transparency laws in Canada.

“And its proposal significantly undercuts the rights enacted in Ontario’s Pay Transparency Act, 2018. That pay transparency law was never repealed, but the government blocked it from coming into force after the 2018 provincial election.” They’re talking about the Conservative government.

And so—this will just repeat what I was saying earlier—instead of having this act, this act that was already debated, that was already passed, that already went to a vote, come into effect and have the real teeth to enforce what’s going into it, it was put on a shelf to be proclaimed on a later date, which is basically going to be never, Speaker. And then this schedule was brought in so if someone were to criticize them and say, “Well, when are you going to bring back pay transparency?”, they can say, “We did. We did. We brought back the title of it”—but not the spirit of it at all, which is really, really unfortunate.

I’m going to switch topics here. One of things that we heard a lot during deputations was about WSIB, and two things that we heard a lot were—number one, I’d say, was the deeming of workers. My colleague from Niagara Falls, MPP Wayne Gates, has had this bill that he’s tabled a couple of times because it is dissolved every time there’s an election. But what happens with this bill, Speaker, is that you have workers who are injured at work—and if you’ve never been injured at work, you probably believe the WSIB works really, really well. But if you have a significant injury, a long-lasting injury, it’s a fight. It’s a real fight. I can’t remember the stats off the top of my head; I’m sure my colleague knows them, our critic for WSIB, but there’s a high percentage of cases that are automatically dismissed, so you have to fight to stay in there. And if you’re sick, if you’re not feeling well, if you’re badly injured—the mental stress and the financial struggle—it’s hard to keep up that fight.

And then what happens as part of this process is you could be deemed fit to jobs that don’t exist—literally jobs that don’t exist. A doctor who may have never seen you, just reads your case files, can deem you fit to do certain jobs, and then that affects the pay that you get because technically you should be working at these phantom jobs. The reality, though, is if you’re told that you could work as a parking lot attendant, even though there’s not a lot of parking lot attendant jobs anymore—even if you’re told you could be working in an office, but you can’t find a job working in an office and they deem you able to do that, it affects your pay. The only way that this deeming of phantom work works is if you are paid in phantom dollars to pay your phantom bills. It is an insult to injured people and working people that you’re deemed able to do work for work that may not exist in your area.

It’s one thing if you had a job and you refused to go; if they found work for you and you said, “I’m not doing this.” And I’m not talking about not doing it because I’m injured and my doctor’s list of what I’m able to do precludes me from performing this work. But basically, they just say, “You could get a job doing this.” And so, let’s say you live in a city, and they tell you that you could get a job working at a farm and there’s no farm near you, right—but the most obvious one is, you could be a parking lot attendant. We’ve heard this from people in the past, where I can’t remember the last time I actually saw a parking lot attendant. I’ve seen people who give out tickets, but most of that work is automated now. You push a button and a sticker comes out or a little piece of paper comes out, and then on the way out, you put the strip back in and you pay. That’s a whole different thing from what’s going on with this with the deeming bill.

A really loud and strong request from people was just to restore WSIB benefits to 90%. And I was surprised how many people deputed and how many people came into committee saying what changes they wanted and brought this up on a regular basis. Because they’re currently at 85%, and I really thought that people would want a much larger increase. The WSIB—typically for people with severe injuries, long-lasting injuries and workplace cancers—tends to be a ticket to poverty. And so, when I heard people talking about how important this 5% increase was, it really stood out to me as surprising. But what they told me again and again, these injured workers, is that they’re in such deep poverty from being on WSIB, because WSIB is so broken for them, it creates such deep poverty that this 5% would mean the world to them. The 5% was clawed back, I think, by the Mike Harris government; I can’t quite remember—I’m going by the dates. But there was a promise prior to the last election to restore this. Well, it’s been almost two years. Let’s fulfill that promise.

Imagine the difference you could make, especially with the cost-of-living financial crisis we’re in where everyone is feeling that pinch. Imagine the difference you could make for really, really poor people living in poverty who are injured, who are in pain, who have mental health issues because of the stress of trying to deal with their finances and not being able to make the money they did when they were working. Imagine the difference you could make, the relief you could provide by giving that 5%. That 5% would mean the world to them.

Something else I hadn’t really considered—and it makes sense when you hear it; this is one of the reasons we have committees, as people will bring these voices forward and talk to us—is how difficult things are for WSIB when you’re racialized. Ontario is becoming a chosen place more and more for people from different countries. I’m loving in Sudbury, for example, just two weeks ago, we had an event that is called Akwaba that was put together to welcome Africans to Sudbury into the francophone community. There were little certificates that were created for them and a shared meal together and just an amazing change to how Sudbury is changing. We have always been a francophone community, but primarily not an African francophone community, and seeing our culture change and our workplaces and schools change is a wonderful thing.

But when we heard from people talking to us about what it meant to be racialized and on WSIB and the difficulty there, even though we’re in a country where it is bilingual, it’s difficult sometimes to get service in French. And then if your primary language isn’t English or French, it’s that much more difficult. If you think about how difficult it is for someone whose primary language is English to get services and help in WSIB, imagine trying to work through translation or when you’re not able to understand as effectively, and the frustration of being on hold for so long or people not returning your calls for several days. It’s very, very difficult. And for immigrant workers, once you’re injured and you return back home, you’re basically out of luck and that’s a sad state of affairs because we have a lot of migrant workers who come in to help with agriculture who are very important to these industries. If they’re injured and they’re sent home and there’s no compensation or help or support for them, even though they’re injured doing work that people would be doing here in Ontario, they should get the same support. And basically what I was told is, if you’re injured as a worker and sent back to your home country, you basically have no help at all, which is not something any of us would want for any worker here.

I want to go through some of the amendments that we had, and this brings us back to the Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act. All of our amendments, Speaker, were voted down. Now, some of them were marked out of order because they don’t speak primarily to this bill, but even then, we’d asked for unanimous consent to at least discuss it—then you can have debate; you can talk about why you think it should be part of the bill, and it could still be voted down afterwards. None of us are naive enough to think that the Conservative government wouldn’t be able to vote them down; they have a majority government and they have more seats than we do as New Democrats, even if we have the independents join us. It’s basically 6 to 3 when it comes to a vote, so very easily they could vote this down, and they could hear about why these amendments would be good. This one about the Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act was voted down—it was ruled in order, but it was voted down. I think that’s interesting.

I want to read this quote from the steelworkers:

“Given the fact that it will likely be over two years since Bill 88 received royal assent and the DPWRA”—Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act—“commencement was delayed with it now being tied to Bill 149 receiving royal assent before it came into force, then perhaps the short title of Bill 149 should be ‘Delaying Working for Workers Act.’ Amending regulations for an act, when the act is yet to be in effect and the regulations simply do not exist because they have yet to be written, renders those proposed amendments meaningless.” This is the part I like about this: “We submit to you that if workers provide this level of quality in their worker or took over two years to have a task remain incomplete, then they would be unemployed.” Basically, our amendment for this was that, as a default, app workers would be employees, so the employer would have to prove that they are contractors.

Now, I spent about a decade in contracting. I spent about two decades in mining where we use contractors on a regular basis. There’s a world of difference between a true contractor and a worker on an app. Basically what’s happening more and more by companies is that they are telling their employees that they are contractors. You don’t have much control the way contractors do. You’re not actually bidding on the jobs, or specific jobs, but they’re telling you that you are now a contractor. The reason they do this is to get around the Employment Standards Act legislation, to get around LRA, Labour Relations Act, legislation—basically to bypass anything that a normal employee would have. So the reason we’re saying this is that with the Conservatives enshrining the Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act, this ability to pay workers less than minimum wage, this ability to sidestep the protections they have—what we’re saying in this amendment is let’s have these companies prove that they’re independent contractors, instead of the workers having to fight the other way. Because, typically, what happens is when the workers do prove that they’re not, those companies disappear. That’s why Foodora doesn’t exist anymore in Ontario, because those companies proved that they weren’t independent contractors.

Our amendment was very clear: Let’s just make these app workers employees. Then, this was an amendment that was requested by the Interfaith Social Assistance Reform Coalition and the Workers’ Action Centre. We tried moving that forward. That was voted down. In fact, it was voted down with only debate coming from New Democrats and the independent members. The Conservative government didn’t even want to talk about why they wanted to—I said I’m going to share this. I did share it already online. I’m going to share this vote. I’m going to ask very clearly: Why are you standing with these billion-dollar companies while we’re hearing from several members of our community locally in Toronto? Because, people don’t have the resources, when you’re making less than minimum wage, to travel down from across Ontario to speak to the committee. But we had digital workers, these app workers, food delivery service workers come in and talk about how they were working in snowstorms, how they were waiting for work, but they’re only paid for the work while they’re engaged. Because of that, they work many, many hours and they don’t make ends meet, and they make less than minimum wage—less than seven bucks an hour.

If any of us, if any of our kids had a job where they made less than $7 an hour, we would go down and we would talk to that employer. We would call a Ministry of Labour inspector with a complaint, because they would be breaking the law. Instead of realizing and recognizing—which I’m sure the Conservative government does—that they are ripping off these workers, they wrote a law so that these billion-dollar companies can continue to do it. That’s disgraceful. That’s something I would be ashamed of as an MPP, and I’m glad that we don’t support that.

We had an amendment to replicate—the member from London West had the Stay Home If You Are Sick Act. This is basically about paid sick days when people are sick. We just came through a pandemic, but we know when people are sick, they go to work sick and they get other people sick.

New York has had this in effect for a much longer time; I think more than a decade. All the studies have shown that not much changes, except that fewer people are sick in the workplace and fewer people in the workplace get sick afterwards. If you think about if I had a really bad cold and I’m speaking for about 25 minutes for this part of the debate, perhaps the people around me could get the cold too, because I’m breathing out my germs on them. That’s not good for people. So if you’re able to stay home when you’re sick, like all of us are as MPPs able to stay home, you’re less likely to spread that illness around and get others sick.

It also means that parents are able to stay home with their kids when their kids are sick. That’s a reality for a lot of parents. And I talked many times about growing up a little over the poverty line, and I went to school no matter what. The only time I got to stay home was if the school sent me back or if I was physically visual-evidence sick. I don’t want to gross everyone out early this morning, but that was the reality. And that’s the reality for a lot of people, especially these low wage workers, these minimum wage workers and these workers who are gig workers making less than minimum wage. And so, having the ability to have paid sick days—this was also not accepted by the Conservative government.

We tried bringing forward the anti-scab bill. We talked about how important this was, how it would help people. This would really help, for example, the ACTRA workers who are coming up on two years of being locked out. The ACTRA commercial workers have asked, I think three times here, for the Conservative government to stop buying advertising from these ad industries that are using replacement scab workers for these ACTRA commercial workers. They continue to do this. They continue it on a regular basis—not only not passing anti-scab, not only choosing to support companies that aren’t using the scab replacement workers, but very happily buying commercial advertising from companies that are providing advertising made by replacement scab workers.

I don’t know how you say you’re working for workers if people are literally doing without for two years, standing up for their rights, standing up for fair contracts, standing up for retirement benefits and pensions, and the Conservative government is saying, “No, in fact, what we’re going to do is put a little bit of the money in the pockets of the people who are using replacement workers to do your job.” They didn’t support that, as well.

I talked earlier about my colleague Jeff Burch from Niagara Centre who had a bill about including wildland firefighters. I’ve talked in the past about the Captain Craig Bowman Act and was 100% complimentary the previous time that I was speaking. This was a non-partisan thing. My colleague from Niagara Centre brought it forward and it got adopted into this bill. This is the cornerstone of this bill. This is the reason that, more than likely, we’ll be supporting this bill. As much as there’s a bunch of garbage in here, we can fix that in other legislation. But we want to support this family.

But why don’t we include the wildland firefighters as well? They deal with fires as well. They’re workers as well. In fact, they have less protections than urban firefighters. One of the first things you think about for an urban firefighter, a firefighter in the city, is the full-face respirator they wear over their mask with oxygen on their back. That’s one of the first things you think about for their uniform, is the distinctive hard hat they have, the firefighter’s helmet, and then it’s that respirator with the pack on the back.

Do you know what wildland firefighters have, Speaker—a wet handkerchief—when they’re out fighting fires, and no presumptive coverage. They can provide the data that their members are also getting sick, but the Conservative government, when it comes to this amendment protecting these wildland firefighters—“No, we’re not going to do that.” I’m hopeful they’re going to bring it forward at another time, but I think that we shouldn’t be holding our breath, and I also think these wildland firefighters shouldn’t have to hold their breath either when it comes to protecting themselves in these conditions.

I think, to wrap up, I’m just going to say that the Captain Craig Bowman Act that was brought into this, with the support of the minister and the previous Minister of Labour, is the highlight of this bill. Everything else needs a lot of work.