This column originally appeared in the Globe and Mail

People are going to work sick. They always have. The difference is now it’s deadly.

In Alberta, major outbreaks at a meat packing plant have seen hundreds contract COVID-19 and too many deaths. People reported going to work even as they displayed symptoms, under pressure from their employers to come in.

The lockdowns needed to combat COVID-19 have been costly and difficult for many people across Newfoundland and Labrador.

We’ve stayed away from relatives – older ones who need our help, younger ones reaching milestones we’ve missed – to contain COVID-19. Businesses have shut. Workers have been on furlough or laid off.

We can’t let all this hard work and sacrifice go to waste.

We are running out of time.

Every day there’s a new study or argument published in newspapers or magazines, demanding paid sick leave to curb the spread of COVID-19 and its super-spreading variants.

Canada is a big country. That is why, as a nation we are so heavily reliant on our airline industry with routes reaching every corner of the country. That is why there is so much at stake right now.

Think about it. Families today are spread across vast distances. Atlantic Canadians finding work in the oil patch. Western kids moving east for jobs in Toronto, Montreal or Ottawa. Older Canadians living out their dreams of retirement somewhere quieter.

While we continue to wait on the federal government’s belated promise to implement a $15 federal minimum wage, questions often arise as to how future rate increases should be handled. While the government has identified wage increases based on the rate of inflation as a possible way forward, other metrics, such as using the median hourly wage, proposed in U.S.

As originally published by The Toronto Star

By Jerry Dias

Now more than ever, Canadian workers need our political leaders to act swiftly and decisively to support them, their families and communities.

By Jerry Dias

At the beginning of the pandemic, Unifor made two broad demands of government.

The first was to protect public health and ensure all workers had access to sick leave and immediate income assistance. The second was to build an economic stimulus package big and bold enough to speed Canada’s economic recovery and build the Canada so many of us believe is possible.

Nothing gets my blood boiling like seeing a worker cross another worker’s picket line to steal their job – and I’ve seen it way too often.

Across most of this country and in every single federally regulated sector, there is virtually nothing to stop it happening – and that needs to change.

Two years ago, our family concluded that our grandmother needed care in a long-term care facility, given her deteriorating health. She ended up being placed in a retirement home, where there is less hands-on care available because there were no available long-term care spaces. At the time, the wait list for a long-term care bed in Ontario was around 35,000 and the average wait time was between 5-6 months.

The debate over regulating Google and Facebook took an interesting turn recently, when prominent Canadian nationalist Richard Stursberg teamed up with Kevin Chan, Facebook’s lobbyist in Ottawa, to publish an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail that maps out a regulatory path for our federal government.

The fact that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has been doing everything he can to resist regulation in Australia, is sending out his lackeys to push for regulation in Canada means he’s worried about what our government might do.