B.C. Family Day – will it help or hinder the B.C. economy?
As an aspiring BC Liberal leadership candidate, Christy Clark had no trouble proposing a new statutory holiday in February that she wanted to call Family Day. From Ontario to Alberta, the February holiday was already established. And with a post-leadership provincial election in her sights, she could do what her predecessor Gordon Campbell had done so many times before: promise one thing going into an election – “I won’t sell BC Rail” – and do the opposite after the election is history.
But the election plan never materialized. She dithered and the window she hoped would stay open a little longer closed. Now she has to deliver on her holiday promise.
In the right-left world of BC politics, that holiday will ruffle some important feathers.
The BC Liberals’ biggest backer – B.C.’s corporate sector – is not exactly a “family-friendly” group these days. Another statutory holiday in B.C. is not high on their priority list. In fact, Clark’s Family Day campaign promise must have sounded as pleasant as fingernails on a blackboard when she first proposed it. Let’s not forget, the BC Liberals are a political party that embraced the $6 training wage with great enthusiasm, ignored the plight of B.C.’s lowest paid by denying an increase in the minimum wage for more than a decade and turned the clock back on employment standards to a period that looked more like the Middle Ages than the new millennium. Becoming a champion of a new statutory holiday is about as foreign to this political party as it is to the corporations that have bankrolled it from the beginning.
Despite that opposition, the fact remains that B.C. workers deserve a paid holiday in February. For the sake of our health and our families, governments need to adopt measures that allow citizens to step away from work and enjoy life a little more. According to Statistics Canada, longer working hours for the average Canadian means that during the typical workday we spend about 45 minutes less with our families than we did 20 years ago. We are working more hours per year than we did 20 years ago, a fact that reflects how most families are coping with the squeeze on their income. They’re working more to make up for the lack of real wage increases.
Whatever disconnect B.C.’s corporate sector might have about the prospect of Family Day in this province, the reality is that other provinces have already made the change. Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario have all introduced versions of the February holiday over the last decade. B.C. is something of a laggard and needs to get in line with other jurisdictions.
There is no doubt that many of the corporate types that are backing Jim Sheppard’s so-called Concerned Citizens group are having a tough time squaring their unflinching support for a premier that is establishing a holiday that they don’t like or want. Fortunately, however, for average British Columbians, the decision to adopt Family Day is like the train that has left the station: it’s too late to stop it.
That said, the glaring contradiction between the premier’s attempts at playing the populist and the corporate interests that have for so long served as the critical base of her BC Liberals will make her tenuous efforts to hold her party’s fractious coalition together just that much more difficult. No doubt the grumblings from within her ranks about the choices she has made will not go away anytime soon.
The important point to make in all this? There’s never a dull moment in B.C. politics and, sometimes, because of it, progress arrives in some unexpected ways. The fact that it arrives is what we need to celebrate. Enjoy your Family Day. You deserve it. •
