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Public investments mean things like child care, transit, and every once in a while in Toronto we talk about transit, or so I’m told.
But access to transit, access to child care, access to affordable housing.
And so those three pillars are really crucial.
If people think my rent is affordable, there is some kind of after-school program for kids, and I don’t have to travel two hours to a job,
there’s accessible transit, these are the kinds of public policy things…
And these all cost money, obviously, they cost money.
But to me, those are the kinds of things that governments and publics and communities say we’re going to invest in, because that’s the kind of society we want to live in.
To me the most interesting thing loops back to what I talked about earlier, which is the welfare state of the 1960s and ’60s, which assumed a traditional employee-employer relationship.
Increasingly we don’t’ see that.
So what’s the role of government?
To me, the role of government is to start to expand benefits in easy that go beyond employee-employer relationship.
So are there ways to do employment insurance for contract workers and the self-employed, yes there are.
So you can do those kinds of benefits and start to think about them for workers in non-traditional relationships and again, those are big public-policy things.
And I think really looking at the benefit package there are other things.
The employment standards act and how you enforce that for temp agencies, for contract workers, for part-time workers.
You can do all kinds of things.
You start to have this discussion around minimum wage, for example. So, should there be a different minimum wage for people in traditional work
with a traditional employee, or a slightly higher wage if someone is on a short-term contract?
To me that makes sense. It’s not a lot of money.
It’s not big for government, it’s not big for employers.
If you’re hiring someone in an unstable temporary contract for three weeks, you have to pay a little premium for that, if you’re looking for that flexibility.
But there are all kinds of things you can do where some of that risk, some of that cost, is transferred back on to government.
And more of that risk is transferred back on to employers as well.