Stephen Harper didn’t hide what he thought of working people. His government waged attacks against collective bargaining. They tried to force unions to develop overly bureaucratic measures to make their finances public to non-members. They resisted and dismantled social programs that help people, even if they had few or no benefits through their work. And they oversaw changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program that threatened the livelihood of as many as 70,000 workers.

When he was elected in 2015, Justin Trudeau promised a new era of cooperation with workers. He has been friendly with labour leaders. He has tried to show that he can work with business and labour. He has gone to union conventions to promote his party’s agenda. His reception has been generally positive.

But in October, the honeymoon ended. While at a young workers’ conference, Trudeau faced his first, direct protest.

As we say good riddance to 2016 and look forward to 2017, Trudeau’s approach to workers will help voters gauge just how feminist, progressive, and worker friendly he really is. Will he keep his promises to working people? Here are five issues to watch for 2017.

Canada Post

When Harper cut door-to-door mail delivery in 2014, he sent a signal to Canadians: public services, even long-standing ones, can be eliminated. Shrouded in a discussion about modernization (even though the corporation continues to be profitable), the Conservatives used Canada Post as a proxy to wage an attack on good jobs and collective bargaining.

The Liberals promised to restore door-to-door mail delivery. They negotiated a contract with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers in December 2016, and sent the question of door-to-door delivery to a committee where Liberals members held the majority. The committee recommended expanding Canada Post’s services and agreed that daily delivery should continue. They didn’t recommend postal banking, a service that would offer Canadians basic and cheap banking services. The NDP issued its own report, criticizing the committee for this oversight.

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers has been calling for an overhaul to Canada Post for years. They envision an organization that can undercut the high costs of banking, dispense medical marijuana, and deliver food to Northern Communities, among other services.

If the Liberals are interested in sustainably transforming Canada Post, CUPW’s recommendations should be considered carefully. But their committee report suggests that they prefer to limit the scope of Canada Post’s mandate, which will surely result in more job losses, worse service and even the demise of the postal service itself. What will the Liberals ultimately decide?

Phoenix payroll system

The federal government is the direct employer of hundreds of thousands of workers. Due to the implementation of the Phoenix pay system, 82,000 workers have had problems with their pay, in some cases not being paid at all. More than one year after the Liberals took office, there were still 200,000 transactions that had not been completed, and 18,000 workers who still had problems with their pay.

According to the Public Works and Government Services website, as of January 11, there was still a backlog affecting 8,000 workers.

The new pay system was implemented six months into the Liberals’ term. Even though this decision was made prior to their election, the way in which they’ve handled it has been a disaster. How much longer will workers have to manage with these problems?

Bill C-27

On October 19, the Liberals introduced legislation that would amend the Pension Benefits Standards Act, called Bill C-27. It would give employers the option to not fund employer’s contributions for pension plans. This opens the possibility for employers to reduce benefits, even retroactively.

The change would apply to Crown corporations and federal public sector employers. The Canadian Labour Congress called the legislation “a betrayal,” that “was even rejected by the Conservatives.”

Removing the legal requirement that corporations fund their pension contributions would threaten billions of dollars in pension money. That’s money that older Canadians rely on to buy food and pay for housing costs. 

Childcare

During the 2015 election, the Liberals rejected the NDP’s plans to create a national childcare system. Instead, they implemented individual fixes, such as offering families more money through a universal child benefit.

Of course, when there’s no childcare available, more money available for families doesn’t quite fix the problem.

In late December, a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report showed that childcare costs are climbing and families are increasingly desperate. When parents can’t find childcare, their ability to hold a full-time job is threatened.

The Liberals have promised a pan-Canadian framework, but work hasn’t yet started on the framework. In 2017, this will be a critical policy area that Canadians should watch. Will the framework create enough spaces? Will there be a cap placed on fees? Will they deliver before the next election, or will the results of this work be put towards voters at the next election?

Temporary Foreign Worker Program

The changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program that were brought on by Harper’s Conservatives are only now coming to bear, and how Trudeau and his ministers reform the program will have important implications on hundreds of thousands of workers and their families.

As most of these workers fall under provincial labour jurisdiction, the big question is: will Trudeau allow more of these workers to immigrate to Canada and work here as citizens? How will they reduce exploitation?

Already, they’ve scrapped a rule that forced Temporary Foreign Workers to wait for four years to come back to Canada after having completed a four-year work period. As they campaigned to “fix” the program, ensuring that workers can find paths to permanent residency or citizenship will be critical.

Photo courtesy Instagram/justinpjtrudeau.

At least, that was the message that emerged from December’s “pension summit” in Whitehorse, where finance ministers and senior government officials from across Canada met to formulate a response to the failure of Canada’s baby boomers to adequately prepare for their own retirement. A turbulent decade in the equity markets, a marked decline in the number of private-sector pension plans, and an unwillingness or inability on boomers’ part to save enough means many members of Canada’s biggest generation face retirement years that may not exactly be golden. But while there are ideological and political differences of opinion on how this apparent crisis ought to be addressed, one thing was clear: the en masse retirement of the boomers presents a huge challenge that is still going untended.

Right now, Canada has one of the more generous government benefit plans in the world, with the combined income from the Canada Pension Plan, Old Age Security, and the Guaranteed Income Supplement totalling as much as $36,000 per couple, or $19,000 per person as of 2009. Improving the lot of Canada’s retirees is a worthy goal, and the question of retirement income deserves closer study given the virtual disappearance of defined benefit pension plans in the private sector and the sorry fact that bankrupt companies’ pension recipients are among the last to be paid when creditors come to collect—as ex-employees of Nortel recently learned.

But there is something wrong if improving today’s pensions means saddling tomorrow’s workers with the bill—a very real possibility when it comes to pension reform. One of the most popular solutions floated in Whitehorse was a significant increase in contributions to the Canada Pension Plan in order to pay for the imminent bulge of retirees. One scenario would see employee contributions rise from 4.95 percent to eight percent, a 60 percent increase (and a 300 percent increase from the rates the boomers themselves paid for much of their working lives).

Harry Satanove, an actuary and pension advisor, worries that placing the burden of pension reform on young Canadians, many of whom are saddled with monstrous levels of student debt and all of whom suffer disproportionately from the consequences of a stiffening job market, is unfair. “We shouldn’t be relying on our kids and grandkids to pay for our pensions,” he said in a December 11, 2009, article on pension reform published in the Tyee. “There’s not enough of them to support all of us.” Unfortunately, that appears to be precisely the plan, and not just when it comes to pension reform, either. The federal and provincial governments failed to anticipate the crunch, and the shortfall will have to be covered by the next generation of taxpayers. Thanks to a declining birth rate, the number of elderly Canadians has been on the rise for some time and that figure will peak in the next 30 years as the “dependency ratio”—the number of workers for every non-working adult—falls from five-to-one today to twoto-one by 2040. One study from early 2009 estimated that pension, health care, and other senior-related programs will cost $1.5 trillion over the next 50 years. Rising costs and falling revenues—partly owing to new debt from 2009’s stimulus spending—are a toxic combination. Yet there has been no national conversation of any significance, no meeting of provincial and federal ministers, and no sense of urgency about how Canada will fund this massive liability.

In view of these facts, the recent panic over the state of Canada’s retirement infrastructure establishes a worrying precedent. Those speaking on behalf of Canada’s baby boomers prefer to frame the retirement issue as an effort to improve the post-work prospects for all future generations, but the timing of its arrival on the national stage betrays that elegant smokescreen: It is no coincidence that retirement-related issues suddenly became a pressing national concern as the first baby boomers began to collect retirement benefits—just as it won’t be when health care, assisted suicide, and other senior-related issues become pressing concerns in their own time.

That’s not to attribute malicious motives to the boomers, but instead to acknowledge their demographic dominance simply overwhelms the agendas of other constituencies. Federal and provincial politicians have reacted to the concerns of Canada’s largest generation with a degree of responsiveness unheard of on files like student debt or the environment. And it isn’t surprising that the boomers have the ear of policy-makers, given both their numbers and their relative enthusiasm for voting. But privileging the interests of one demographic over those of another is a recipe for conflict. Younger Canadians can only hope that the politics of the next 40 years isn’t defined by it.