Seasonal Workers in New Brunswick

Honourable senators, I rise today to continue the debate on Senator Rose-May Poirier’s inquiry, which so powerfully brought to light the realities facing seasonal workers in the New Brunswick fishery.

I am addressing this important issue because it affects not only daily life in my region and in the fisheries, but also the daily reality of many regions in this country and other economic sectors, including tourism, arts and culture, the restaurant industry and many others.

According to Statistics Canada, 3 per cent of jobs in Canada are seasonal, but in Atlantic Canada that number is much higher, namely 5 per cent in Nova Scotia, nearly 6 per cent in New Brunswick and nearly 10 per cent in Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. In my region, northern New Brunswick’s Acadian Peninsula, seasonal jobs can account for up to 15 per cent of all the jobs in the region.

This type of work is very significant in Canada, not just because of the number of jobs created across the country but also because of the important contribution it makes to our national and regional economies.

Despite this fact, seasonal workers are plagued with structural and systemic issues. The question of seasonal work emerges year after year as a crisis needing our immediate attention. However, regardless of government efforts, few pilot projects and initiatives seem to work or tackle the full complexity of the issue at hand.

I myself do not claim to have all the answers, colleagues. I speak today with the singular hope that more Canadians and parliamentarians take notice of this growing problem and make it a priority to find real solutions with the people who are most affected by these issues.

Today I’m going to focus on the alarming state of seasonal work. I’ll cover some of the innovative solutions to the issue that we’ve seen in recent years, and I’ll end by going over some of the options we as legislators have to take action on this important issue.

What is so-called seasonal work? According to Statistics Canada, a seasonal job is a non-permanent paid job that will end at a specified time or in the near future, once the seasonal peak has passed. Fishing is a well-known example of seasonal work: fisheries open on a given day and close on a given day, depending on the type of fish. Seasonal work is a reality in other economic sectors too, especially tourism and culture.

The actors and artisans who work at Pays de la Sagouine in Bouctouche, the interpreters who bring the Village historique acadien in Caraquet to life, and the term employees who work in national parks across the country all find themselves out of a job when tourist season is over. The temporary, intermittent nature of these activities makes it impossible to find full-time, year-round work in these sectors.

Canadians have a general understanding of this reality, but they don’t tend to understand the day-to-day reality of the women and men who work in these industries. What are the real working conditions of seasonal workers? What impact do our public policies have on their socio-economic situation? Most importantly, what can we do to ensure that these workers live with dignity without feeling that they are living off the government, as is often our society’s view of them?

Honourable colleagues, it is difficult to find hard evidence to answer these questions because Statistics Canada has not done in-depth studies of seasonal work since 2007. However, the issues associated with this type of work just keep growing.

I will focus on two of the main challenges that will help us understand the systemic nature of the problems related to this type of employment: the infamous black hole and the chronic lack of workers.

Systematically, year after year, in many parts of the country, seasonal workers face what is commonly known as the black hole. This is the period of time between the end of EI benefits and the start of the new work season. As Senator Poirier aptly stated, the duration of the black hole varies from year to year depending on the unemployment rate.

As the unemployment rate goes down, the number of hours required to be eligible for employment insurance goes up, and, perversely, the benefit period becomes shorter. Senators will understand that this makes it more difficult to access employment insurance.

This is a problem in Atlantic Canada and in many rural regions across the country in particular, where unemployment rates are going down, but for reasons that could be considered artificial. For example, the unemployment rate is dropping rapidly in New Brunswick, but this is mainly because the population is aging rapidly and a larger number of workers are reaching retirement age.

My home province has lost more than 11,000 workers since 2013 because many residents have retired or left the province to find a job elsewhere. Dear colleagues, within 15 years, there will be 40,000 fewer workers on the job market in New Brunswick.

The systemic problem that seasonal workers face is fundamentally because our public policies are not adapted to the realities of seasonal work and the regions that depend on these industries.

As a sociologist and welfare expert from Dalhousie University, Karen Foster wrote in a 2017 article that:

Employment Insurance is not a program designed to cater to seasonal workers. By default, it has become that program, but as we saw with the issue of the black hole, structurally it does a poor job at helping seasonal workers transition from one season to another.

This black hole is a reality that ultimately has a serious impact on Canada’s entire job market. When seasonal workers experience financial uncertainty year after year because there are no programs tailored to their types of jobs, they become discouraged from building a career in these industries. What is worse, more people are leaving their regions because of this situation, which makes the skills shortage in certain sectors even worse.

If we traditionally think of seasonal work as only affecting our fisheries and agriculture sectors, we must remember that the tourism industry, one of the fastest-growing industries in Canada and the world, relies heavily on seasonal and contract work.

In a 2016 report, Tourism HR Canada estimated that in 2020, there would be over 130,000 unfilled jobs in the tourism sector across Canada. This gap between job postings and available workers would grow to over 240,000 jobs in 2035.

This reality is not unique to this industry. Many other seasonal sectors are having difficulties finding and keeping their employees. This is partially due to the lack of programs that support seasonal workers.

This widening gap between the workforce available and the number of jobs available clearly shows the ineffectiveness of the public policies that support the workers in these industries. What, then, can we do? What solutions can we propose to deal with this unfortunate situation?

Professor Karen Foster proposed a solution that goes well beyond simply reviewing the employment insurance program. She said, and I quote:

As a sociologist who studies work, unemployment, productivity and, most recently, rural economies, I have come to believe that a basic income is the most promising solution to cyclical and structural unemployment, and especially the seasonal employment that sustains the Atlantic provinces, where I live and work.

There are many reasons, but three stand out.

First, a basic income lacks the moral baggage of EI or social assistance. It’s a moral project, certainly, because it rests on the belief that everyone deserves to live with dignity and security.

Second, a basic income dispenses with the increasingly naïve idea that we can employ everybody all the time.

Third, a basic income could do all this without a gigantic bureaucratic structure full of people whose job it is to make sure other people are being honest about their job searches. It could replace much of our current patchwork of regular government transfers, each with their own piles of paperwork, in a single payment.

There could still be top-ups for people with disabilities and parents of young children, and EI would have to remain for people who lose their jobs. But EI as a Band-Aid solution for the wounds left by seasonal industries could disappear entirely.

Dear colleagues, this proposal is nothing new to Canadians. Previous governments looked into the possibility of implementing such programs. Take, for example, the MINCOME project, which was carried out in Manitoba in the 1970s. Under that program, the federal and provincial governments provided a certain percentage of the population with a basic annual income. The Government of Ontario also explored this concept more recently. Unfortunately, both of those projects were cancelled before they were completed so there is no data available for legislators.

That being said, Canada has some fortuitous experience of sorts with basic income, which shows how beneficial this type of program can be. I am talking about Old Age Security and its companion programs. The OAS gives all Canadians aged 65 and older the ability to organize their lives knowing that they will receive a guaranteed fixed income every month. That changes the lives of many Canadians overnight, since, once they turn 65, they no longer have to deal with the uncertainty of a variable income. Imagine the impact that such a program could have on the lives of Canadians who have to make difficult decisions every year just because their industry is unable to offer them year-round employment.

Honourable colleagues, no matter what we call it — universal income, guaranteed minimum income, basic income — it seems that this idea has the distinction of tackling a number of major issues affecting Canada’s labour force head on. At the very least we have to very seriously consider this proposal as a structural solution — which I cannot do in this speech — that seems to offer tangible answers to many of the problems related to seasonal work.

Another solution put forward by several groups of seasonal workers would put an end to the challenge of the unpredictable nature of the black hole by creating protected areas.

These zones could be created in specific regions where there is a high concentration of seasonal workers, a new category to qualify for employment insurance. This new category could be exempt from the equations linked to the fluctuating unemployment rate, meaning that the criteria to qualify for EI and the length of the EI period would both be fixed.

This means, unlike as is currently the case, a worker could plan years in advance how to distribute his revenue from his seasonal work and his EI payments, similarly to what is proposed by those in favour of a minimal guaranteed income, and would have the benefit of allowing workers to plan their time.

In closing, honourable colleagues, the central issue for people who work in seasonal industries consists in the precarious nature of the industry and the uncertainty of their income. In that sense, any solution that would make it easier for these workers to plan their budget deserves our full attention as legislators.

Are the solutions I presented today the right ones? Are there others? What are the real solutions to this systemic problem? I’m not sure, but I do know that we must urgently and seriously address the problems facing our constituents who work in seasonal industries.

Colleagues, the labour market and the work world has greatly changed over the last few years. Unfortunately, our public policies are not adapted to these new realities. There is an urgent need for us to create a committee or to mandate a committee to study the question of atypical work in Canada and to face the complexity of these issues head on.

We have colleagues in this chamber who are engaged in these issues, people like Senator Bellemare and Senator Ringuette, who have proposed a number of initiatives involving full employment or the creation of a standing committee on human resources so that we may work together and explore these issues pertaining to workers and their working conditions as soon as possible.

In closing, I believe we should pass Senator Ringuette’s motion immediately to create a human resources committee so that we may conduct a thorough examination of labour market outcomes here in this place, in the Senate of Canada.

Thank you.