A New Brunswick government backbencher said a proposal to mandate 10 paid sick days in the province should be scrapped, saying that employees will misuse the time off.
“Basically, what we’re doing is we are saying to employees, ‘You’ve got another two weeks off,'” said Ross Whetmore, the MLA for Gagetown-Petitcodiac.
“You can say what you want but there’s going to be a number of them that are going to misuse that.”
Whetmore made the comments at the close of a public hearing on paid sick day legislation at the legislature’s law amendments committee.
The proposal comes from Green Party Leader David Coon and would see the number of legislated sick days in the province boosted from five unpaid to 10 paid. Right now only British Columbia, Prince Edward Island and Quebec mandate any paid sick time.
Businesses in B.C. must provide five paid sick days, while those in P.E.I. provide three. Employees in Quebec start with a baseline of three and can accumulate a maximum of 10 over the course of a year.
The federal government also recently extended 10 paid sick days to all federal employees and mandated the same for employees in federally-regulated industries.
Nine organizations were invited to speak before the committee and offered a wide range of perspectives on the issue, after which MLAs voted to send the bill to the department of post-secondary education, training and labour for further study and consultation.
Anti-poverty organization Common Front for Social Justice argued that expanding access to sick days is the right thing to do. Provincial co-ordinator Janelle LeBlanc pointed out that those without sick days are most often lower paid and are less able to afford to take a day off when they’re sick.
“Sick leave allows for workers to take time off without worrying about stress associated with paying bills,” she said.
“Workers are struggling to make ends meet with the soaring cost of living and many cannot afford to stay home without pay even if they are sick.”
Those representing New Brunswick businesses say that the proposal is costly and would remove a key differentiator that employers are using to attract workers in a competitive labour environment.
“Some businesses are providing sick leave already and use that as a competitive advantage and what we’ve heard from most of the ones that don’t is they would if they could,” said Morgan Peters, policy manager for the Fredericton Chamber of Commerce.
Coon’s proposal included temporary government support for small- and medium-sized businesses to help them cope with the transition. But according to Louis-Philippe Gauthier, the Atlantic vice-president for the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses, the proposal should only go forward if that support remains “in perpetuity.”
Otherwise, “it should be left up to the marketplace,” he said.
Just five per cent of New Brunswick CFIB members favoured the introduction of 10 paid sick days, according to a survey conducted in May. However, 28 per cent of respondents supported three employer-paid sick days and another 20 per cent supported five. Forty-two per cent said they wouldn’t support any employer-paid sick leave.
However not all business groups spoke against the proposal. The Better Way Alliance, a network of Canadian businesses that advocates for higher wages and paid sick leave, told the committee that paid sick days can benefit employers as well as employees.
Co-director Liliana Camacho says that the businesses in the network, which range in size from two to nearly 500 employees, report little in the way of increased costs and virtually no increase in the amount of sick time taken by employees. Camacho says sick days are best looked at as an investment that increases productivity and decreases turnover.
Better Way says they support the idea of helping smaller-sized businesses make the transition and say forcing all employers to offer sick leave can actually level the playing field between larger corporate employers and smaller local ones.
“Legislating paid sick days is really important to be able to level this playing field that regardless of what employer you’re working for a worker is able to access paid sick days and for businesses to all have the same structure in terms of their labour force because they’re all valuing workers equally,” Camacho said.
Others said the proposal should ensure that any government financial support for businesses go to those who really need it.
“We believe that small businesses, medium-sized businesses, of course, they’re going to require some financial support to adapt to this new legislation,” said CUPE New Brunswick president Stephen Drost, speaking on behalf of the N.B. Federation of labour.
“But do the Cookes need extra money? Does the Irving family need more money? I’m not attacking that particular empire, it’s a statement. Any of these multi-million-dollar corporations that are making significant profits, why should a taxpayer have to ensure that their workers can stay home to prevent illness in others?”
Whetmore was the only MLA on the committee to come out for or against the proposal, telling his colleagues that the government should avoid creating red tape and instead create an environment where businesses can “do what they want to do and take care of their employees.”
Whetmore spent much of his life as a small business owner and said his biggest pet peeve was the government telling him what he could and couldn’t do.
“Day in and day out I had government telling me what I can sell milk for, what I can sell gas for and now government is going to tell us that we have to provide paid sick leave,” he said.
“A lot of these small businesses that we’re dealing with are treating their employees like family, we’d give them anything.”
Whetmore went on to talk about an employee who was diagnosed with terminal cancer who had always dreamed of swimming with dolphins. He says he paid for the employee and her husband to go to the Dominican Republic for a week to make that a reality.
“When you turn around and handcuff small businesses and tell them ‘this is what you’re gonna do, this is what you’re gonna do, this is what you’re gonna do,’ the long and the short of it is, you handcuff us so much we can’t do what we want to do,” he said.
There’s no timeline on when the department could come back with an alternate proposal, or any guarantee the government will move forward with one at all.