Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Motion No. 27, a motion from our colleague Senator Lankin calling on the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology to conduct a study on the future of work in our so-called gig economy.

I’ve been thinking a lot of about the genesis of the word “gig.” Originally, the word referred to a small, two-wheeled carriage pulled by one horse, a lightweight vehicle suitable for short, quick trips. You wouldn’t take a gig for a long cross-country journey or on a trip where you had to carry a heavy load of goods to market. Your gig was your sporty, fun vehicle, not a stage coach or a farm wagon. It was there for a good time, not a long time. In some instances, a gig could also be a light, fast, narrow boat, suitable for rowing or sailing. But, again, a gig was a pleasure craft, not something you used on a long ocean voyage.

Misogyny being what it is, the term gig was also used in the 18th century to refer to a flighty or flirty girl, something that whirled around like a whirligig. By the late 1920s the term gig was generally used by jazz musicians to refer to short-term periods of work: a show, a concert tour or a contract.

Today, we’ve appropriated this jaunty, jazzy word to use in another sense — to describe short-term, precarious, often poorly paid employment. There’s something a bit perverse and grim about this misuse of the term. The gig was once something a little bit mischievous, a little bit joyous, a fun activity done on the side. Maybe our continued use of the term has blinded us or shielded us a bit from the grim realities of the so-called gig economy because, let’s be honest, people aren’t working gigs for a little extra pin money in 2021 or as a hobby or a side hustle. We have people now scrambling to stitch together contracts and part-time work in order to pay the rent, buy the groceries and keep their kids in coats and boots. Calling it gig work romanticizes it and makes it sound fun, Bohemian, carefree. It’s really more akin to the bitterly hard work of the industrial economy — the piecework.

COVID-19 has laid bare the stark realities and limitations of trying to survive or get ahead through a series of part-time and short-term jobs or contracts, without job security and certainly without things such as dental benefits, drug coverage or pensions. There is nothing cool or hip about working two, three or four part-time jobs just to keep the lights on, especially when each of those jobs is precarious or poorly paid.

Sadly, many types of employment that used to be considered safe and secure have been turned into gigs. While no one in 1926 became a jazz musician or a vaudeville comedian for the sake of job security, it used to be if you were a university professor, an advertising executive or a lawyer you had a job — sometimes a job for life. Now, for many younger Millennials, formerly secure professional careers have become a series of tenuous gigs too.

I greatly fear that the economic and social disruptions created by COVID-19, including our new work-from-home paradigm, will only exacerbate the unravelling of the fabric of traditional employment.

In my own home province of Alberta, we have long had our own unique love-hate relationship with contract work. A decade ago when Alberta’s economy was booming, many people here were quite happy to work as independent contractors and not salaried employees. That word, “independent,” mattered to them. Doing contract work gave them a feeling of freedom and control, like the freelance knights of the medieval era beholden to no corporate overlord. Those contracts were lucrative enough that people didn’t mind foregoing things like drug plans or job security in exchange for more generous remuneration.

Many people in Alberta’s energy sector and many outside of it were happy to work a short, well-paid contract and then move on to the next project, whether they were engineers, marketing consultants, nurses or construction workers.

But with the collapse of oil and gas prices, many of those sorts of jobs simply evaporated, and the pandemic has made Alberta’s pre-existing economic crisis even more dire. The last few years have been dark and difficult ones for many people in my province. Tens of thousands of Albertans have lost their jobs, and never before has Alberta been in more need of a serious conversation about the way we have structured the culture of work in our communities.

As a resource-linked economy, we are used to weathering cycles of boom and bust, whether we were producing beaver pelts, wheat, coal or oil, but the haunting sense that this current bust may represent a new normal is still hard to absorb.

This evening, I want to speak in support of Senator Lankin’s initiative, both as an Albertan, worried about the prospects for economic recovery in my province, and as a mother, watching my daughter and her friends enter an economy where it sometimes seems everyone is scrambling to piece together enough bits and bobs of work to make a living. I hope you will join me in urging the Senate and the committee to take up Senator Lankin’s challenge and reconsider the way we have ordered, or disordered, our work world. Thank you. Hiy hiy.