Since the 1940s, diseases like these have been kept in check thanks to drugs like penicillin and streptomycin that drove death rates among both animals and humans – especially children under five – way down. Bacteria, however, haven’t survived for 3.5 billion years without developing defence mechanisms against environmental insults, and this includes modern pharmaceuticals. Called antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, this survival tactic has created a crisis that experts say is as urgent as climate change.

“Antimicrobial resistance is at levels that we’ve never seen in developed countries,” Barkema says. “There will come a time when a wound cannot be treated anymore if it is infected.”

AMR is getting worse in part because of animal antibiotic consumption. The statistics are grim. An estimated 104,079 tonnes of antibiotics will be used by the agriculture sector by 2030 as the demand for pork, beef and poultry grows, especially in low- and middle-income countries. A 2023 article in The Lancet connected animal antibiotic consumption with resistance in human diseases: in 2017, AMR was implicated in the deaths of 1.27 million people. AMR is expected to cause 10 million deaths by 2050, making it more dangerous than cancer.

The ever-increasing industrialization of agriculture is one of the drivers. The United States has mega hog facilities that each produce hundreds of thousands of animals every year. In Canada, 7,000 hog operations produce about 25.5 million animals every year. And China, which began large-scale swine and dairy production about four decades ago, has built a 26-storey pig high-rise that researchers say will be a conduit for disease due to crowding, which, among many things, causes stress that decreases natural immunity.

Chinese farmers didn’t have the husbandry skills or experience to optimize herd health, says Barkema, a dairy cow specialist and infectious diseases expert who has made numerous trips to China, advising dairy farmers on their operations. “A blanket of antibiotics” was used to “cover mistakes in management,” he says. “The best way to prevent antimicrobial resistance is by prevention of infections, because then you don’t have to treat them – period.” Nevertheless, China remains the world’s largest consumer of agriculture antibiotics, using 30% of overall antimicrobial production for livestock maintenance, according to the journal Current Research in Microbial Sciences.

Western nations, too, have been guilty of antimicrobial overuse since the 1940s, when it was discovered that low-dose antibiotics not only prevented disease but caused animals to gain weight. Administering constant low doses killed off weak bacteria but inadvertently selected for stronger ones, increasing AMR. Legislation in the United Kingdom, the EU and North America has banned the use of antibiotics for such use; however, such restrictions are less diligently maintained in lower- to middle-income countries, Barkema says.

Once bacteria develop resistance, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. The B.C. Centre for Disease Control encourages the reduction of antibiotics in humans to try to tackle AMR. Animal husbandry practices, however, counteract the measures increasingly being taken by human medicine practitioners, with antibiotic use in animal farming growing by an estimated 8% between 2020 and 2030, according to Nature.

The ability to leap the species barrier makes the spectre of AMR increasingly grim, and more research is needed to assess how easily resistant bacteria pass from animals into humans.

The Government of Canada reports that 14,000 deaths were linked to AMR in 2018, while AMR was directly responsible for 5,400 deaths. In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 2.8 million infections and more than 35,000 deaths in humans related to AMR.

There will come a time when a wound cannot be treated anymore if it is infected.

 

– Herman Barkema, infectious diseases expert

 

Tackling AMR requires what has been dubbed a “One Health” approach that involves coordination between animal health, human health and environmental experts. In Alberta, where Barkema is based, more than 100 researchers from different disciplines – human and veterinary medicine as well as the Ministry of Environment and Protected Areas – are working on antimicrobial stewardship. The public is “very much involved,” with regular informational workshops on what individuals can do to fight AMR. “We need to make the public aware of this silent epidemic,” Barkema says.

The One Health approach is growing globally. In June, four multilateral agencies – the World Health Organization, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Environment Programme and the World Organisation for Animal Health – released A One Health Priority Research Agenda for Antimicrobial Resistance to advocate for increased research and investment.

The same month, the Public Health Agency of Canada released the five-year Pan-Canadian Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance. It was developed with federal partners, the provinces and territories to strengthen the country’s collective AMR response using the One Health approach.

Critical to combatting AMR is improved diagnostics, says Ian Lewis, a visiting fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary. Last year, Lewis developed a new technology that would allow a laboratory to identify in less than 20 hours the specific bacterium causing a blood infection and the types of antibiotics it will respond to. The short diagnostic timeline is a vast improvement over the two- to four-day period required in the past to identify the strain of bacteria causing sepsis, which causes one in 18 deaths in Canada. During this wait, medical staff had to guess which antibiotics to use – sometimes selecting the incorrect one – then switch to the right drug once the offending bacterium was identified. “When the guesses are wrong, patients are at a dramatically higher risk for death or serious complications,” Lewis says. “The main issue is that the chance of dying goes up by 7% per hour when patients are receiving the wrong medication.”

Being forced to guess treatment also exacerbates resistance. “The widespread use of antibiotics in hospitals and in the community is a central problem that is contributing to AMR,” says Lewis, speaking from the 2023 ASM/ESCMID Joint Conference on Drug Development to Meet the Challenge of Antimicrobial Resistance, held in late September in Boston. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about half of all prescribed antibiotics have zero medical benefit. This is “directly attributable to a lack of rapid diagnostic tools,” Lewis says, adding that improved diagnostics should be used in veterinarian laboratories as well as human labs.

Lewis says that the implications of AMR are so dire that “it will eclipse climate change as a primary concern. People will start dying from common infections that are imminently treatable now.” AMR doesn’t present simply infection risks; it also means that people will have to eschew elective surgery or certain types of chemotherapy that cannot be undertaken without antibiotics as the risks of getting an incurable infection could outweigh the potential benefits of therapies. “Antibiotics are the foundation of modern medicine; if we don’t do something about the emerging burden of antimicrobial resistance, Canadian life expectancy could be 20 years shorter,” Lewis says.

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based magazine writer, documentary filmmaker and author, specializing in gender, conservation and environmental stories. 

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This is the first major update to the act since 1999, and while science and our understanding of pollution have evolved, Canada’s main toxics law has failed to keep pace. Canadian companies that have adopted strong chemical-management practices and replaced problematic substances with less hazardous alternatives will celebrate these latest moves to bring federal regulations into the 21st century. 

Here are a few things you should know about the new, updated CEPA. 

The “right to a healthy environment” will be recognized for the first time under federal law. This will enshrine our right to functioning ecosystems, which we all rely on for a livable planet. In terms of chemicals policy, the government will have to consider not only the environmental impacts of substances, but also the injustices that vulnerable communities and future generations bear when they are disproportionately affected by pollution.  

This commits Canada to integrating human rights into its chemical-management decisions, as racialized and low-income populations experience higher exposure to hazardous chemicals and therefore greater health harms.  

To help manage the issue of chemicals Whac-A-Mole, where one toxic substance is banned only to be replaced by another similar one, Canada will institute a “Watch List.” The Watch List will include substances that can pose a risk to human and environmental health, and is meant to provide an early warning signal to companies about which chemicals will likely be restricted in the future to discourage companies from replacing one hazardous substance with another.  

Another significant change to CEPA gives people in Canada the power to request formal safety assessments of chemicals or substances they are concerned about. The ministers of health, environment and climate change have a new responsibility to consider and respond to your requests. 

As a crucial step toward protecting human health and the environment, Canada will prioritize the banning of substances that are carcinogenic (cancer-causing), mutagenic (cause gene mutations), toxic to reproduction (negatively affect fertility, pregnancy or fetal development), persistent (slow to break down, and stay in the environment or our bodies for a long time) or bioaccumulative (accumulate within organisms). These bans will reduce the presence of these substances in consumers, in the workers who make these goods, and in our air, water and land..  

Case in point: “Forever chemicals” (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS) have been used extensively to make waterproof, non–stick, stain-resistant and grease-repellent products for decades. PFAS are, in fact, a group of thousands of chemicals that have been linked to asthma, high cholesterol, liver damage, low infant birth weight, early menopause, immune suppression, thyroid disease, and some cancers. They’re commonly referred to as “forever chemicals” because they never really break down. 

They’re used in clothing (particularly outdoor gear), cosmetics, takeout food containers, cookware, even menstrual products. These highly persistent, toxic chemicals aren’t just polluting our bodies; they’re creating a toxic legacy for future generations. 

The good news is that the new CEPA sets us up to better manage whole classes of chemicals, such as PFAS. In fact, the government recently released a draft report on PFAS and signalled its intention to regulate the entire class of chemicals, starting by declaring it toxic under CEPA. This approach recognizes that these chemicals don’t exist in a vacuum, and considers the cumulative effects of our exposure to thousands of PFAS every day. 

The next step will be for the government to regulate PFAS in order to reduce exposure. Disappointingly, so far they’ve proposed restrictions only on PFAS in firefighting foam. While firefighting foam is a significant source of PFAS pollution, and disproportionately harms heroic firefighters, it is just one of many sources of PFAS exposure for people living in Canada. With new authority under CEPA to prioritize bans on persistent substances, this would be an invaluable and necessary opportunity for Canada to consider more comprehensive restrictions.  

We would not be acting alone. The European Union is leading the way on policies to regulate and prohibit PFAS. It already has a plan for the “largest ever ban” on PFAS. Why should people living in Canada settle for piecemeal prohibitions when more is possible and preferable? Now is the time for Canada to put the new CEPA to the test and take a holistic and precautionary approach. We should be banning all 4,000-plus PFAS in all consumer products, as well as in firefighting foam.  

The federal government has more power to protect us from toxic substances than ever before. Let’s hope they use the new tools in a timely and effective manner. 

Ashley Wallis and Cassie Barker are senior program managers at Environmental Defence 

The post The Canadian government has new powers to fight toxic chemicals – will it use them? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

From a sustainability perspective, all that flying likely undid the climate benefits that accrued during the plane-free skies in COVID’s first year – evidence that pent-up demand for travel still exerts a greater emotional tug than global warming.

Indeed, tourism carbon is mostly about the journey. A round-trip flight for two between Toronto and a Caribbean sun destination for a week of rest and relaxation generates almost two tonnes of greenhouse gases, whereas a typical passenger vehicle produces about four to five tonnes in a whole year.

Yet the footprint of flying hasn’t slowed global demand for ecotourism, which was estimated to generate about US$180 billion in 2019, with revenue expected to almost double by the end of the decade. Much of that market is about nature and wilderness travel and off-grid experiences featuring basic accommodations. According to a survey this year by Booking.com, 71% of respondents wanted to green their travel plans, a 10% increase from 2021.

The urban hospitality sector, at pains to make itself relevant again in the Airbnb era, has sought to secure a slice of this pie with hotels promising sustainability features that go beyond the standard-issue reminders to patrons about used towels.

A U.K.-based energy retailer, Uswitch, earlier this year compiled a ranking of cities with the greatest number of green hotels, based on various public data sources and a so-called sustainability badge introduced late last year by Booking.com. “To achieve the approved sustainable travel badge,” the survey notes, “each hotel has to share their carbon emissions, water consumption, food consumption and waste, animal welfare, and many other environmental factors.”

In the green building industry, net-zero is a building that produces as much energy as it uses. For those of us focused on the climate crisis, there’s a higher bar, to have a building that doesn’t use any fossil fuels.

-Bruce Becker, architect at Becker & Becker

Canadian cities, as it turns out, fare quite well, and especially Vancouver, which isn’t all that surprising, given that the city’s electricity is almost entirely derived from hydro power. According to Uswitch, more than 40% of Vancouver’s hotels qualify for Booking’s sustainability badge, with Stockholm and Toronto ranking second and third globally.

One of the Toronto properties cited is 1 Hotel, a new luxury venue that’s part of the Starwood Capital Group’s vast real estate empire, via a subsidiary called SH Hotels and Resorts. There are eight other 1 Hotels, in places like New York, Tennessee and South Beach, Florida. According to SH’s corporate director of sustainability and impact, Corinne Hanson, “[Starwood founder] Barry Sternlicht, with the inception of the 1 Hotels brand, wanted to create something that was sustainability driven, mission driven, both in its core design and its operations.”

Hanson, who also sits on Starwood’s ESG board, rhymes off some of the features, and they do include variations on the theme of garden-variety green building elements. The company sought to use “found objects” to create some of its decor and sourced its furniture through a partnership with Just Be Woodsy, a Toronto company that salvages wood from felled city trees to makes its products. There’s an onsite composter, with the results used for the facility’s garden and plantings. Hanson says 85% of the hotel’s waste is diverted from landfill, and the goal is to achieve zero waste.

Another feature: that 1 Hotels aims to reduce embodied carbon by using existing buildings where possible. “We always try to look for buildings to repurpose, so we can try to address embodied carbon, even though we might not always be able to offset the total of our embodied carbon,” Hanson says. “We try to be quite transparent about that.”

In the case of 1 Hotel Toronto, this particular claim can be seen as an elegant elision of eco-spin, savvy business strategy and, well, the truth. The building itself, in the rapidly intensifying King West area, was home for several years to another swishy boutique hotel, the Thompson, a Toronto International Film Festival party favourite. It was shut down in 2019 for a “facelift,” per The Hollywood Reporter, so it could be rebranded as a 1 Hotel. The new luxury version was to open in 2020, but that timetable got scotched for all the obvious reasons.

A more compelling example of recycling buildings can be found in New Haven, Connecticut, where the former corporate headquarters of the Armstrong Rubber Co., a fortress-like Brutalist office building that opened in 1970, has been transformed into the Hotel Marcel, part of Hilton’s Tapestry Collection, whatever that means. (The hotel is named for Marcel Breuer, the original architect.) Hilton claims it will be the first net-zero hotel in the United States.

[Starwood founder] Barry Sternlicht, with the inception of the 1 Hotels brand, wanted to create something that was sustainability driven, mission driven, both in its core design and its operations.

-Corinne Hanson, SH Hotels and Resorts’s corporate director of sustainability and impact

“In the green building industry, net-zero is a building that produces as much energy as it uses,” Bruce Becker, an architect who acquired the long-vacant landmark structure, told The New York Times. “For those of us focused on the climate crisis, there’s a higher bar, to have a building that doesn’t use any fossil fuels.”

It’s not easy to determine whether these projects represent corporate greenwashing, a new twist on luxury accommodation or some kind of genuine improvement. Certainly, salvaging a giant concrete edifice from the wrecking ball would seem like a progressive gesture that fully embraces one of the core tenets of the circular economy. With 1 Hotel, however, the storyline seems to include a lot of branding alongside the eco-feature shopping list, although Hanson insists SH is “a cause rather than a brand.”

She acknowledges that Starwood, as a large real estate asset manager, has yet to make public a detailed accounting of its carbon performance, despite the company’s home page proudly announcing that it is both a carbon-neutral company and a signatory of the Principles for Responsible Investment. The first quantified ESG report is expected next year.

Still, one could certainly argue that urban tourism, which makes use of well-trafficked places with transit and infrastructure, is more sustainable than travel to stunning and remote locales found at the far end of complicated and carbon-intensive transportation network. Those journeys may leave a lot more footprints, carbon and otherwise, in places that once had few of them. Who is to say whether it is morally superior to travel to the Far North to take in the tragic majesty of a warming ecosystem as opposed to booking a room in a swanky hotel with all the eco-fixings that also happens to be in the middle of a big city.

Is the trend toward hyper-sustainable hotels merely going to generate more air travel? Given the seeming paradox, what is SH communicating to potential customers looking for sustainable experiences? As Hanson readily responds, “I think that’s the right question.”

The post Are green hotels as sustainable as they claim? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“The growth potential is immense. But the social-impact potential, that’s phenomenal,” says Sa’ad Shah, co-founder and managing partner of Noetic Fund, which recently opened their second round of funding, looking to raise $200 million. The Toronto-based venture capital fund invests specifically in new therapeutic treatments, and psychedelics are a big part of their focus. Shah says Noetic has already seen the market grow exponentially in the last year and predicts a market cap into the billions soon. “If you miss a week, you’ve missed a year,” Shah says.

While psychedelics might seem like an under-the-radar industry now, it won’t stay that way for long. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, backed start-up Atai Life Sciences, which boasted a valuation of US$2.3 billion. Champion boxer Mike Tyson has put his cash behind Wesana Health, which had a market cap of more than $40 million in December. Celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary is also talking up psychedelics, saying in May that the potential of psychedelics “far exceeds the potential of cannabis.”

With one in five North Americans experiencing a mental illness in any given year, a growing crop of investors, companies and researchers are betting on the medicinal future of psychedelics. Currently, there are about 50 publicly traded psychedelic companies globally, most funding, supporting or completing their own clinical research. Some focus on psilocybin (you might know them as magic mushrooms), and others are exploring chemical derivatives such as MDMA, ketamine and LSD. Leading medical research facilities like Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital are dedicating new centres and resources to study the use of psychedelics in treatment. One major Canadian centre, at Toronto’s University Health Network, received a $5-million donation from entrepreneur Sanjay Singhal in October.

Though psychedelics research dates back to the 1950s and ’60s, the U.S. Controlled Substances Act put the kibosh on it, when psychedelics got lumped in with other drugs and possession became a federal crime. One of the longest-running research bodies in the market today is the non-profit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). For more than 30 years, MAPS has led the industry when it comes to studying the use of psychedelics in mental health treatments. It’s recently had a boost from the for-profit sector. In September, Wesana Health committed $1.5 million to MAPS to continue research into the effects of MDMA on traumatic brain injuries.

For investor Raad Seraj, having an institution like MAPS on the scene helps create a different way of looking at mental health. “They are creating an alternative pathway from a purely for-profit, Big Pharma model,” he says. As a venture partner at The Conscious Fund, Seraj has helped create new ways for retail investors to invest directly in therapeutic psychedelic start-ups. Investors like Seraj and Shah say that getting into the psychedelics market is about changing not just how these substances are viewed culturally, but how the whole field of mental health works.

In a standard therapy session, you might speak with a therapist about a specific issue, while they help you unpack your feelings over months or years. That therapist may prescribe medication to alleviate symptoms of depression or anxiety. Now imagine that same therapy session but with a low dose of psychedelics. Rather than take a pill daily, like a standard antidepressant, a patient would take a clinical dose of the drug in the presence of their therapist and work through their “trip” during the session.

When you look at the numbers, not just from a humanitarian perspective but from an economics perspective, more organizations will quickly come to the conclusion that covering access to psychedelic-assisted therapies is a good investment.

Ronan Levy, executive chairman at Field Trip Health

Research suggests that for someone suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, for instance, MDMA coupled with therapy can reduce feelings of fear and defensiveness and heighten feelings of trust. That’s why investors like Seraj are not just seeking out these opportunities but trying to bring others along with them. Seraj hosts regular sessions to introduce potential investors to the world of psychedelics. His goal with The Conscious Fund is to bring the investment opportunities to what he calls a community of “micro-angels” – those who don’t have a ready $125,000, the usual minimum for venture capital funds. “I think start-ups and early-stage companies around the world are recognized as the dominant generators of wealth. And archaic rules [requiring investor accreditation] generally have kept [regular] folks out of this market.”

But can the burgeoning sector avoid the cannabis problem, where legal businesses and grow operations are overwhelmingly owned by white people, while across North America people of colour are still more likely to face charges or jail time over drug possession? For Seraj, any investor has to support general decriminalization. “It doesn’t cost the [legal] market anything. In fact, the more you destigmatize it, the better it becomes.” He believes that more mainstream psychedelic use could help lower rising rates of ecological anxiety, distress and depression over climate change. “There’s a big connection between climate change, mental health and consciousness,” he says. “[Psychedelics are] how you create a resilient, adaptable human culture that can actually face what’s coming.”

For Ronan Levy, executive chairman at Field Trip Health, which offers ketamine-assisted psychotherapy in a dozen North American cities, the more these therapies become accessible for people, the more users will become aware of the historic inequalities in the field, and the more ideas on how to address them will emerge. “One of the social side effects of psychedelic experiences seems to be increased empathy and regard for other people. So it’s kind of a solution that starts to feed itself.”

Of course, there’s a long way to go before these therapies are available to everyone. For one, many of the substances, including MDMA and psilocybin, will likely not get the legal green light for another few years, though some jurisdictions are leading the way. Detroit decriminalized psychedelics in November 2021, meaning that possessing psilocybin is still illegal, but police won’t prioritize those arrests. The California state senate passed a bill last summer to legalize psychedelics, though the bill still has to pass through other layers of government before it becomes law.

And the therapies that are available now can be prohibitively expensive for many. A full round of treatment at Field Trip, for instance, is hundreds of dollars per session. Levy says that’s an issue that Field Trip is still grappling with, and it comes down to access. “Insurance is a piece of it, and innovating around group therapies to lower costs,” he explains. “I believe that when you look at the numbers, not just from a humanitarian perspective but from an economics perspective, more organizations will quickly come to the conclusion that covering access to psychedelic-assisted therapies is a good investment.”

Levy anticipates that once more physicians and counsellors become comfortable using these therapies in their treatment, the benefit to the healthcare system could be huge. “I think the U.S. alone spends close to $250 billion on treating depression and anxiety with the cost of medicine and the ancillary services, so you can appreciate just how large of an industry this can be. [It can become] the primary form of mental-health care.”

Of course, that boom that Levy predicts is dependent on a number of factors. Clinical trials have to keep getting positive results and legislators have to take big steps forward. With that in mind, Janet Gray, a certified financial planner with Money Coaches Canada, suggests a bit of caution for the curious investor. “We’ve been through this before, with cannabis five years ago and Bitcoin a few years ago. There’s always something new to excite the market to this degree.” She says she’d invest 5% of her portfolio into psychedelics at this point, possibly up to 10% for a long-term investment. Even if there’s a case of investment FOMO, Gray advises people to do more research. “What are the medical people saying? What are the legislators and policy-makers saying?” From there, Gray says, you’re in a much better position to see how far down the rabbit hole you’d like to go.

Emily Baron Cadloff is a Halifax-based journalist. She often writes about pop culture, food and education.

The post Investment trip: Why psychedelic stocks could take off in 2022 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Unfortunately, only 55% of workers agree that their organizations are both socially and environmentally responsible in their business practices. There is clearly an opportunity here for companies to do better.

In recent years, the use of environmental, social and governance (ESG) indicators to measure a company’s performance has exploded in popularity – and with good reason. In addition to mounting public expectations for companies to be “good corporate citizens,” a 2021 meta-analysis conducted in partnership with NYU and Rockefeller Asset Management points to a growing body of evidence that good corporate management of ESG is tied to improved financial performance.

But beyond higher stock valuation and shareholder returns, the findings of the LifeWorks Research Group’s August 2021 Mental Health Index also showed that an organization’s behaviour can significantly impact workers’ mental health and productivity. We found that workers who report that their employer is environmentally and socially responsible also report, on average, having better mental health.

It turns out that those who feel a sense of belonging or acceptance have higher productivity than those who don’t. That warm and fuzzy sense of belonging is an important marker of psychological safety, one that can be activated when the company you work for aligns with your personal values, whether it’s support for action on climate change and plastic pollution or a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion.

How did polling play out in different parts of the world? The results for all four countries surveyed are fairly similar. However, Australians rate their employers the best on social justice, while the Brits are last on this front. U.K. respondents are the least impressed by their employers’ ESG efforts, while U.S. workers are the least likely to say that ESG is important to them.

By and large, respondents in the bottom third of mental health scores in all four countries were significantly more likely to not feel a sense of belonging and acceptance at work. They were also significantly less likely to agree that their employer is socially and environmentally responsible. The workers who would recommend their organization as a “great place to work” (an indicator of engagement) just so happen to be on average 11% more productive than workers who would not.

The data is clear on a number of fronts. Improving a company’s performance on environmental and social metrics brings more value to shareholders, yes, but also, employees who feel good about their companies’ environmental and social behaviour reported better worker productivity, engagement and psychological safety. The triple bottom line: organizations would do well to deepen their commitments to environmentally and socially responsible business practices if they want to keep their workers happy.

Paula Allen is senior vice-president of research and total well-being at LifeWorks.

The post Does working for a sustainable company make you happier? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

If all goes well, 2021 will be a year of recovery for people, organizations and countries worldwide.

As the COVID-19 vaccines continue to roll out, there is a growing confidence life will return to “normal” – albeit with renewed priorities and thinking around health and economic prosperity.

With this revised view of society’s values, the Industry Strategy Council (ISC; established by the federal Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development) recently released its Restart, Recover, Reimagine action plan. It’s an ambitious and transformative approach, leveraging this crisis to help Canada build a sustainable digital and innovative economy across all key sectors.

The ISC’s report says an ambitious industrial strategy for Canada should include four main pillars: 1) become a digital and data-driven economy, 2) be the environmental, social and governance (ESG) world leader in resources, clean energy and clean technology, 3) build innovative and high-value manufacturing where Canada can lead globally, and 4) leverage our agri-food advantage to feed the planet.

The plan identifies the health and related biosciences sector as one of the key areas of investment to help reignite the economy and protect Canadians’ health and safety. Given the right enablers, it acknowledges the importance of the sector to foster research, product development and innovation to strengthen Canada’s economy and healthcare system for the long-term.

To get there, Canada will need to modernize and optimize our regulatory systems to better champion innovation and attract investment to scale up and anchor high-potential firms, prioritize strategic value-based procurement to accelerate innovation adoption, and mobilize high-quality talent and “upskilling.”

Thankfully, Canada is already at a significant advantage, given our highly skilled workforce and world-class research facilities. The health and biosciences sector is one of the fastest-growing industries in Canada’s economy, accounting for 1.8% of GDP and 3% of employment. Investments in the sector reached $1.6 billion in the first half of 2020, bringing the sector closer to its goal of doubling its annual equity capital size from $1 billion to $2 billion by 2025.

The recent funding growth demonstrates the active role governments and private investors are playing in building up Canada’s health and biosciences sector. These investments are helping to achieve advancements in areas such as big data, drug development, AI, gene and cell therapies, regenerative medicine, 3D printing, precision medicine and vaccines.

Still, there is a lot more work to be done. The ISC recommends two broad areas of focus to empower the sector:
Get governments working better, together

The pandemic highlighted noticeable gaps in mobilizing our intellectual capital to develop innovative products and the need to improve procurement and regulatory agility to secure access to essential diagnostics, devices and drugs. Canada needs to adjust its health procurement and sourcing strategies to ensure the resilience of domestic capabilities. Federal, provincial and territorial governments need to work together to adopt value-based procurement across the country’s health systems.

Also, the regulatory approval processes among various levels of governments must be streamlined to improve cooperation between academic labs, health authorities and industry; facilitate a speedier introduction of much-needed innovations into the domestic market; and, in general, create a stronger competitive business environment.

Create a stronger investment climate and a stoic ecosystem

Canada needs targeted investments across the sector, including for building digital infrastructure to support a homegrown digital health strategy and enable data-driven advances in healthcare (e.g., telehealth services for rural and Indigenous communities and the elderly).

Focused investment in advanced high-value biomanufacturing will yield a substantial multiplier effect throughout the economy. Governments need to do more to promote domestic and international private-sector investment in Canada’s biotech and medical technology firms, including the development of later-stage venture- and private equity–capital funds. Establishing renewed public-private partnerships and investments as well as industry collaborations with the global biopharma industry is vital. This can help address potential shortages in diagnostic tests, vaccines and treatments against future pandemics such as COVID-19.

Across Canada, 33% of biotechnology and life-sciences employers report skills shortages, and 20% have job vacancies in their companies. Canada needs to do more to attract, develop and retain skilled talent in the sector by ensuring that Canadians are equipped for these highly skilled jobs. Streamlining government skills programs to benefit youth entering the workplace as well as advanced career executives will be key.

Canada’s response to COVID-19 showcased the strength of our health and biosciences sector –as well as its weaknesses. Proven capabilities in science, discovery, innovation and entrepreneurship – alongside our highly skilled and diverse talent – position us to mobilize the sector into an innovation-driven economic engine.

The Canadian health and bioscience brand needs to be celebrated and promoted to Canadians and the global marketplace. We should no longer accept being an off-balance-sheet pipeline of talent and innovation, generating economic benefit for other jurisdictions.

Healthcare is 10% of our economy, so we need to double down and build on this momentum by implementing policies that will drive innovation, entrepreneurship, scaling up and anchoring of great bioscience companies here. With commitment and bold action, Canada can grow its health and biosciences firms to support a more sustainable health system while advancing Canada’s prosperity.

The post How to ensure Canada’s health sector remains an engine of economic prosperity appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But as the COVID-19 pandemic brought the global economy to a grinding halt, locking down working parents and idling activity in many sectors, it became clear that if we don’t put caring back into the economy, we can’t achieve economic recovery. The pandemic has revealed economic fault lines that must be addressed. We can’t “get back to normal”; we need to create a better normal. And we certainly won’t be able to build back better without making the caring economy a critical component of federal recovery plans.

He-cessions and she-coveries

In past recessions, downturns would most deeply affect goods-producing industries, which have historically been dominated by men. Canadian economist Armine Yalnizyan named these “he-cessions” that were then followed by “she-coveries” as women increased their participation in paid work to support household incomes. This kind of “within-family insurance” meant women provided the stopgap in hard times.

The 2020 economic crisis has taken a different path. It’s become clear that the traditional “family insurance” model doesn’t work in a pandemic recession. Service sectors such as retail, personal services, childcare and hospitality were among the hardest hit – sectors staffed predominantly by women. In Canada, 56% of women workers are concentrated in these occupations, compared to 17% of men. This “she-cession” has meant that in March 2020, 63% of job losses fell to women, and as the economy reopens, women’s jobs are coming back at less than half the rate of men’s.

Those job losses have been exacerbated by closed schools and shuttered daycare centres. Because of gendered norms about who is responsible for children, many women have had to switch from full-time to part-time work or leave jobs entirely to care for or home-school children of all ages.

In August, UN chief António Guterres cautioned that the pandemic may undo three decades of progress toward gender equality in economic opportunity. “Without a [concerted] response,” he noted, “we risk losing a generation or more of gains.”

Writing caring out of the economy

Feminist economists have for years pointed out that production (in the market economy for goods and services) and reproduction (in starting and maintaining families) are intimately intertwined. Unpaid work caring for children, elders and households enables the economic activities that get counted by measurements such as gross domestic product (GDP). However, in traditional economic thought and practice, women’s work at home was seen as altruistic and having no “value” since it was not sold on the market the way male activities were. Though if we were to value women’s unpaid work at home, it would be something like US$10.8 trillion globally each year.

Separating care work done by women from the image of the economy has been so effective that today in implicit association tests – meant to measure our preconscious cognitive biases – more than 75% of people (of all genders) associate women with family and men with careers.

Even in Canada, which professes a commitment to gender equality, women still perform nearly two times more unpaid work for households than men. That gender gap has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Though many men took on more care work during the initial lockdowns, we are learning that – as the economy reopens – their contributions are returning to pre-COVID levels, but women’s remain elevated. (And, by the way, this analysis excludes non-binary and transgender people: another problematic aspect of traditional economic models is to reinforce the gender binary in our society.)

At the same time, women are putting their bodies on the line to make sure we get the food, medicine and care we need. Women – especially women of colour – make up the majority of workers in the nursing and personal-care sectors that have been essential for meeting the COVID-19 health crisis, as well as the majority of staff in grocery stores and other businesses deemed essential.

Further, a wave of bankruptcies has hit the childcare industry, with many daycare centres unable to weather the lockdowns or recoup the extra costs of social distancing, cleaning and disinfecting. Surviving centres will have reduced spots. These closures will have two impacts on women’s employment: since daycare centres employ predominantly women, there will be fewer jobs, and since there will be fewer spaces for children, more women will need to leave work to care for their own families. In the U.S., Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that in September alone, 865,000 women dropped out of the workforce – four times the number of men.

There will be no “she-covery” from this recession. Instead, building back will require aggressive investments in the care economy.

Investing in care pays dividends

Often in recessions, government spending has focused on major infrastructure projects to get the economy going again. After the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal saw the construction of dams, power stations, roads, bridges and power lines. The extraordinary success of that program has imprinted in our minds that investing in physical infrastructure is the way out. But in 2020, we need a different kind of infrastructure investment: investment in social infrastructure, primarily in the care economy.

In September’s throne speech, the Trudeau government said it recognized the urgency of the challenge, noting that “Canada cannot succeed if half of the population is held back.” The government pledged to make “a significant, long-term, sustained investment to create a Canada-wide early-learning and childcare system.” No specifics were shared, but if a federal investment is to be meaningful, it must bring public spending on childcare up to at least 1% of GDP, which is still below levels that countries like Sweden or France invest but substantially more than is invested today. It should also come with affordable prices for parents and a living wage and benefits for the workers.

One of the arguments against investing in childcare and eldercare is that it’s too expensive. But this frames the costs as an expense from today’s budget rather than an investment in tomorrow’s prosperity. The U.K. Women’s Budget Group recently analyzed the returns that come from investing 1% of GDP in childcare versus in construction (construction jobs being those typically targeted in infrastructure investing for economic recovery). They found that the childcare investment would create 2.7 times as many jobs as a similar investment in construction, more than a third of which would be in industries outside of childcare. That’s because the investment leads to direct employment in the sector as well as indirect employment in sectors that support childcare centres, including construction, in addition to jobs generated in the local economy as a result of employed workers buying more goods and services.

Of note is that the number of jobs created for men is almost the same whether you invest in childcare or construction, but the number of jobs created for women is almost four times higher in the childcare scenario (assuming the mix of women and men in the sectors doesn’t change).

Of course, investing in childcare is not just about creating jobs in the short-term but also about providing safe environments for effective early-childhood learning. All the evidence suggests that higher-quality learning in preschool leads to better learning throughout the school years, reduced needs for special education, fewer high school dropouts and juvenile arrests, and higher wealth and lower need for welfare assistance in adulthood.

All to say, spending on childcare is an investment in infrastructure, not a short-term expense: infrastructure because the benefits extend beyond direct uses to support the broader community and an investment because it creates benefits that extend well into the future, improving productivity and preventing greater need.

On top of that, research suggests that government investment in childcare pays for itself quickly. In Canada, the province of Quebec implemented a low-fee childcare program accessible to all residents. The investment led to a 1.8% increase in total employment (by creating jobs and also by freeing up women to work in paid employment). For every $100 spent by the government, the province experienced returns of $104 and the federal government, $143.

A caring economy is a green economy

Devaluing caring has also had devastating effects on the environment. Caring for our planet, much as caring for our children and elders, has been framed as an expense that we can’t afford when financial returns are at stake. Since caring has been relegated to the women’s realm, it makes sense that there is a gender gap in environmental views, with women being more concerned about climate change and other forms of environmental degradation.

It’s also true that climate change has a disproportionate impact on women around the world. Like COVID-19, climate change exacerbates existing social and economic inequalities. Climate shocks such as water shortages, heat waves and other extreme weather have increased the prevalence of gender-based violence. As families become more economically insecure, girls are also more likely to be pulled from school or forced to marry early. These impacts are taking place in the global South as well as in many marginalized communities in developing countries.

But many of the proposed green recovery plans still put construction work (such as installing solar panels or wind turbines) at the forefront. These initiatives are most assuredly needed, but it’s important to keep in mind that jobs in eldercare or childcare centres are some of the greenest out there. Care economy jobs – be they in healthcare, childcare, teaching or social services – are inherently low-carbon.

Just as with care work at home, caring for the planet has been framed as in conflict with “real” economic value as measured by our GDP. Ultimately, creating a caring economy redirects our attention, instead, to the value that comes from assuring equal opportunities for people of all genders, drinking clean water, providing good jobs with livable wages, avoiding devastating wildfires, investing in our children’s development, breathing clean air and saving our homes from flooding.

What is now clear is that a thriving economic recovery can be achieved only with a caring economy at its core.

Sarah Kaplan is distinguished professor and director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. She is the author of The 360º Corporation: From Stakeholder Trade-offs to Transformation.

How to pay for the caring economy 

By CK STAFF 

In 2017, the International Monetary Fund estimated that Canada’s labour force could grow by more than half a million – boosting GDP by 4% in the medium-term – if women matched men in workforce participation, and much of that participation gap could be reduced through better childcare options. 

A national childcare program built on lessons from Quebec would require additional federal investment of $80 billion over the next 10 years, representing 0.35% of GDP (assuming 50-50 cost-sharing with provinces and territories) annually. The cost would be offset by economic growth (2.4% higher in the medium-term) created by reducing the gender gap in workforce participation. Federal revenues would increase by 0.36% of GDP (using the 15% federal revenue ratio to GDP), if we base figures on an IMF study extrapolating from the Quebec experience.

Securing dignified eldercare as an element of universal healthcare almost certainly requires a national long-term-care insurance program, with a strong community-based and homecare component, according to the National Institute on Ageing. Setting this up will likely require federal contributions in the order of an additional quarter of 1% of GDP, assuming a matching contribution from provinces and territories. This kind of money would help bring the provinces to the table to hammer out a long-term-care insurance program that could fit within the CPP/CDPQ structures. Together, this would raise Canada’s spending on publicly funded long-term care from 1.3% of GDP to 1.8%, in line with our OECD peers, which would improve and extend eldercare while taking some of the load off the 35% of Canadians who balance paid work with unpaid caregiving.

The federal contribution would be offset by higher levels of GDP (1% in the medium-term) and a reduction in health transfers based on cost savings (0.12% of GDP) resulting from hospital beds being freed up through increased long-term-care spaces and in-home-care support services, which tend to be 80% more cost-effective.

If we dovetail investments in the caring economy with an annual 1% of GDP federal investment into clean-growth areas that align with Canada’s assets, this country could have a thriving economic recovery that readies us for a resilient low-carbon future. This could be financed by low-cost, long-dated sovereign bonds (issued now and put into earmarked accounts to lock in low interest rates), similar to what the EU is doing to pay for its economic recovery plans. Corporate Knights economists estimate this green-recovery investment would raise Canada’s 2030 GDP levels between 5 and 10%. At the mid-range, doing so would increase federal tax revenues by 1.1% of GDP, enabling us to manage our sovereign debt loads and sustain a clean and caring economy over the coming decades. Investing in a caring and green recovery will expand, mobilize and redeploy Canada’s productive capacity, enabling us to pay off the sovereign debt and sustain a clean and caring economy over the coming decades.

 

Building Back Better with a Clean and Caring Economy (2021–2030 annualized)
Program	Federal Government Cost (% GDP)	GDP Boost %	Federal Government Revenue Boost %/GDP (5)	Fiscally Sustainable
Childcare	0.35%	2.4%	0.36%	✓
Eldercare	0.25%	1%	0.15%	✓
Hospital Beds	-0.12%*	–
Clean Economy	1.0%	7%	1.1%	✓

Sources: Corporate Knights estimate based on Building Back Better Synthesis Report, Canadian Institute for Health Information, Caregiving and Care Receiving by Statistics Canada, Conference Board, Finance Canada, IMF, National Institute on Ageing, RBC Economics, Scotiabank Economics

*Reduction in hospital beds used by elders who are better served in nursing homes or home care will enable trimming of future health transfers. 

 

The post How the caring economy can revive us appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The federal government’s Canada Emergency Response Benefit was announced March 25 to the great relief of many workers and businesses across Canada. Regulations, released April 1, were quick to follow. But many vulnerable workers and people in insecure jobs who are afraid to keep going to work but can’t afford to stay home have no relief in sight.

At first glance, it looks promising. CERB will provide $2,000 in four-week blocks for up to 16 weeks for workers who “lose their income as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.” It will be open to anyone who has earned at least $5,000 from paid work or Employment Insurance maternity or paternity benefits in the past year. Applicants must have COVID-related income loss for 14 consecutive days prior to application.

But who exactly qualifies for the benefit was the question on the minds of many workers in essential services, such as those who work at grocery stores across the country. The federal government said the benefit would apply to people in many different circumstances, including “Canadians who have lost their job, are sick, quarantined, or taking care of someone who is sick with COVID-19, as well as working parents who must stay home without pay to care for children who are sick or at home because of school and daycare closures.”

CERB, we were told, would apply to “wage earners, as well as contract workers and self-employed individuals who would not otherwise be eligible for Employment Insurance (EI) . . . [and] workers who are still employed but are not receiving income because of disruptions to their work situation due to COVID-19.”

But, long as that list is, it’s not quite long enough. What about those who are not sick, don’t have kids at home to care for or don’t match any other criteria on that list but are afraid of going in to work but do so because they need the money? There’s no mention of those in essential sectors, such as grocery store clerks who come into contact with hundreds of people daily with little (if any) protective gear. Or pregnant women with little financial choice working in these essential jobs who see contradictory messages about the risks they and their babies face with regard to COVID-19. In Tennessee, pregnant women are being treated as a high-risk group. In Quebec, the latest word is that pregnant women are at higher risk of respiratory illnesses but should still be treated like the general healthy public. What’s a woman to believe?

Pregnant women with little financial choice working in these essential jobs see contradictory messages about the risks they and their babies face.

 

Earlier this week, Corporate Knights published an article on how grocery store workers should be treated as frontline workers, with a big bump in pay to time-and-a-half and at least 14 days of paid sick leave (21 would be more realistic in a time of pandemic) for every worker, regardless of their employment status. We argued that this kind of pay raise would ensure that people who are healthy and strong would keep coming in to work because that kind of pay would make a big difference in their lives. At the same time, people who need to stay home would stay home because they would not lose the income they and their families so desperately need.

Unfortunately, this is not what is happening for the majority of the most vulnerable. Grocery store workers are getting a $2-an-hour pay raise, not time-and-a-half. And few have access to any paid sick or emergency leave days, let alone 14. Most will not have the “choice” to stay home, and if they do, they risk having no job to come back to. The law does not yet protect jobs for workers who stay off work by their own choice because they feel their workplace is unsafe. A workplace has to be officially deemed to be unsafe, and the process for doing so is complex, takes time and puts vulnerable workers who raise the alarm at risk of reprisals. Employment Standards Act regulations have not been adjusted to take this COVID reality into account.

South of the border, we are beginning to see walkouts and strikes at Amazon, Instacart and Whole Foods. Better for Canada to act now to avoid that here.

What’s an employer to do? What should government do? Let’s start with government making provisions for the many extra-vulnerable workers out there, like low-paid, pregnant grocery store employees who need income support and health protection. Let’s also get our provincial governments to make emergency changes to employment standards to protect people who are afraid to keep going to work so that they won’t lose their jobs just because they “choose” to stay home. While they’re at it, the feds and provinces can work together to ensure that no one has to face 14 days of income loss before they can get help. And finally, let’s see all big employers, especially those still turning a healthy profit in the time of COVID, step up and give access to at least 14 days of paid sick and emergency leave. But if that doesn’t happen swiftly, let’s have our governments make them do it.

In a time where we all have to pull together, let’s share the burden among those that can handle it; let’s not put it on the backs of those whose backs are already breaking.

Michelynn Lafleche is a senior advisor to Corporate Knights. She is known for her research on precarious work and labour-market change in Canada.

The post What if you’re afraid of falling ill at work but can’t afford to stay home? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

While the majority of us are holed up at home waiting out the coronavirus, grocery store clerks don’t have that luxury.

Along with doctors and nurses and other essential workers grocery store clerks, drivers and stockers go to work each day, interacting with hundreds of customers and putting their lives on the line so we can get our groceries.

This past week, 48-year old Keith Saunders, a manager at an Oshawa Real Canadian Superstore, died from COVID-19, while a second employee at the store tested positive for the virus. Longos reported that three of its workers including one driver for Grocery Gateway have tested positive for COVID-19, while Metro  has confirmed one its employees has also tested positive.

Clearly, grocery workers are on the frontlines of the pandemic, however, they’re not necessarily getting the support essential service workers deserve.

Hero Pay

To their credit, Canada’s largest grocers have stepped up hourly wages  for store workers.

While the average pay of a grocery cashier is little over $13 per hour in Canada (higher in some provinces like Ontario), they’re now getting about $2 extra per hour, which Sobey’s is calling Hero Pay.

Is $2 more per hour adequate compensation for those putting their lives on the line?

Some of those clerks who can afford to are no doubt staying home, which is why the grocers have moved recruitment activities into high gear

Major grocers have signaled that if workers are feeling unwell, they are encouraged to stay home. Though, in most cases, they don’t get paid.

What more needs to be done for grocery workers financially?

It’s critical for everyone’s safety that grocery workers who interact all day with the public don’t feel financial pressure to come into work because they can’t afford to take a sick day. At the same time, if grocers do offer full paid sick days with no doctor’s note, there’s a risk grocery stores would have trouble staffing their stores.

One solution would be to offer fully paid sick leave without doctor’s notes for up to 14 days, while at the same time topping up worker’s salaries to time and half during the course of the pandemic.

One way the grocery chains could afford the move would be by cutting share buybacks and dividends paid to shareholders, combined with some support from the federal and provincial governments. As an example just half the amount Loblaw Companies paid out to shareholders in 2019 (dividends and share buybacks) would be enough to increase each one of Loblaw’s 194,000 employees pay by $7 per hour for the next three months.

Boosting health and safety measures

Major grocers have stepped up on a number of levels to make stores safer, including hiring security guards (who are also at risk) to restrict the number of people allowed in a store at one time, erecting plexiglass protections for cashiers, providing hand sanitizer and more frequent breaks to wash their hands.

But most stores are still letting workers decide for themselves when it comes to personal protective equipment likes masks and gloves. Grocers should be ensuring that workers in close contact with customers have full access to proper protective gear (e.g. proper safety gloves and masks, which need to combined with proper training to be effective). Admittedly, Canada is in the midst of a protective equipment shortage and Loblaw’s Galen Weston says Loblaw is working “around the clock” to secure medical grade masks, hand sanitizer, and gloves.

To help ensure their safety and the safety of the public, the Public Health Agency of Canada could build ethical guidelines so that grocery clerks and other essential workers are next in line right after healthcare, police and fire workers to receive rapid COVID-19 testing as well as personal protective equipment and treatment.

The federal government can also help ensure that grocery and other essential workers are provided with solutions for emergency childcare needs, which Minnesota, Vermont and the Netherlands are now doing.

In the meantime, we can all play a role thanking these unsung heroes when we see them behind the counter or in aisle.

As German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who made a point to thank supermarket workers in a national address Wednesday, said “Those who sit at supermarket cash registers or restock shelves are doing one of the hardest jobs there is right now.

“Thank you for being there for your fellow citizens and literally keeping the store going.”

What the grocery stores are doing for their workers

Loblaw Companies

• Temporarily increase wages by 15% for all store and distribution centre workers
• Reducing operating hours (7 a.m. to 8 p.m.) with seniors’ shopping hour for first hour
• Modifying service counters to have more pre-packaged product
• Limiting the number of customers allowed in busiest stores
• Installing plexiglass shields for the checkout counters and working to secure medical grade masks, hand sanitizer, and gloves
• [Unspecified] Safeguards to ensure employees don’t lose pay over COVID-19-

Sobeys

• Teammates reportedly washing hands every 15 minutes
• Reducing store hours (from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.) with seniors’ shopping hour for first hour
• Plexiglass cashier screens
• Stopped selling bulk goods, samples
• Floor markers at each checkout
• Strictly enforce policy that teammates who feel sick do not come into work (no mention of fully paid sick-leave)
• All teammates receive an additional $50 per week and $2/hour premium over 20 hours
• Top-up programs for employees in self-quarantine or for taking time off work to care for dependents or children

Metro

• Reduced business hours (7 a.m. to 8 a.m.) with first hour reserved exclusively for seniors and more vulnerable
• Plexiglass shields at the checkouts and floor stickers at check-out lines
• Cash registers now allow contactless payment up to $250 for most credit cards
• Closed bulk counters, soup bars, olive bars and bread-slicers.
• Stores applying a limit for in-store traffic to respect the rules of social distancing
• Employees to stay home if they feel ill (no mention of fully paid sick-leave)
• Greeters at the store entrance to wipe down carts and remind customers about social distancing practices within the store
• Stores continue to be cleaned on a regular basis following high standards of hygiene, and increased frequency of cleaning rounds of equipment cleaning with extra focus on high-traffic areas of the store.
• The wages of its employees working in stores and distribution centres have been increased retroactively by $2 per hour, from March 8 to May 2.
• METRO is offering its employees an additional benefit ensuring an income replacement rate equivalent to 95% of their wages in case of isolation
• Offering access to the Employee and Family Assistance Program (EFAP) to its employees in stores, distribution centres and offices to provide them with the support and advice they need.

Walmart Canada

• Reduced hours and opening hour dedicated to seniors, disabled and those with vulnerable health conditions
• Plexiglass at registers and pharmacy desks
• Bonus of $200 for all full-time associates and $100 for all part-time associates + “Thank You Premium” of $2.00 hourly for every store and supply chain Associate on top of their hourly rate (April 3 through April 30).
• Access to Walmart’s online physician care at no cost
• Support for quarantined associates: two-week replacement pay for associates under mandated quarantine and additional supplemental income for those with confirmed cases who are require to stay home beyond two weeks.
• Mapping out social distancing parameters throughout the store

March 31 update to Walmart policy:

Single-direction aisles are being added to Walmart stores in the U.S. and Canada.

Walmart in the US will begin taking workers’ temperatures at stores and warehouses before they begin their shifts, as well as asking them some basic health screening questions (Walmart US is in the process of sending infrared thermometers to all locations, which could take up to three weeks).

Any associate with a temperature of 100.0 degrees will be paid for reporting to work and asked to return home and seek medical treatment if necessary. The associate will not be able to return to work until they are fever-free for at least three days.

Masks will be made available — as supplies permit — for associates who want to wear them. The masks will arrive in 1-2 weeks. They will be “high-quality masks, but not N95 respirators – which should be reserved for at-risk healthcare workers.”

Toby Heaps is CEO and editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights.

Michelynn Lafleche is a Senior Advisor to Corporate Knights. She is known for her research on precarious work and labour market change in Canada.

The post Are grocers doing enough to keep their frontline workers safe? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The pandemic has already hit many vulnerable workers hard and with hundreds of thousands already applying for EI, unemployment is set to rise very sharply. The federal government has responded with an appropriate first step by announcing major spending packages.

Recognizing that access to Employment Insurance benefits is highly problematic for many low paid employees and non- existent in the case of self-employed and gig economy workers, the federal government proposes two new temporary programs. These are the Emergency Care Benefit and the Emergency Support Benefit, intended to get cheques to impacted workers through the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). It’s important to acknowledge that these emergency benefits, as well as EI, cover a little more than half of earnings up to $450 and $573 per week, respectively. It will hardly be enough to pay for basic essentials of housing, utilities and food in many parts of the country. Imagine a minimum wage worker in Ontario accessing this program and seeing their income drop from about $550 a week to around $300. Improvements are clearly needed. That’s why the Broadbent Institute and others have called for benefits equal to at least 80% of earnings.

Regardless of the amount, it’s imperative that these cheques be distributed as quickly as possible. But the government has already stated this won’t happen before April 1, rent day for many. Top-ups to the Canada Child Benefit and the GST rebate for low-income individuals won’t come until May. These lag times and low levels of support could mean that many Canadians quickly end up in the dire straits these programs are meant to prevent. We’d like to see the federal government give workers the benefit of the doubt and get payments underway while verifying the claims.

Provinces have a big role to play too. Quebec, to its credit, moved quickly to provide an immediate income supplement. Ontario has put a moratorium on evictions tied to unpaid rent and a few provinces have now instituted job protection measures for any employee missing work due to sickness, self-isolation, quarantine or family care. Others are deferring utility bills. These are all helpful one-offs, but they need to evolve quickly into robust provincial packages that supplement income, provide paid sick leave and job protection, keep roofs over peoples’ heads and assist the most vulnerable in our communities.

The reality is the pandemic is bringing to light the gaping holes in our income security system that existed before COVID-19. The steady rise in insecure and low paid work, fueled in large part by a growing gig economy, leaves far too many individuals and families one pay cheque away from disaster. Some of the changes made now to help stem the economic fallout of the pandemic, such as paid sick days and unemployment income support for gig and contract workers, should become permanent features post COVID-19. Delivering these new emergency benefit programs through current CRA accounts sets an administrative precedent for how we could continue these programs in the future.

When it comes to support for businesses, the most pressing issue is to minimize the growing wave of layoffs and coming surge in bankruptcies caused by a collapse in revenue at companies which may already have high levels of debt. Lower interest rates and relaxed bank reserve requirements will help struggling companies in the short term, as will the federal government’s expansion of loans to smaller and medium sized companies through the BDC (Business Development Bank of Canada) and EDC (Export Development Canada), our state owned banks.

The danger here is that we will end up bailing out the owners of corporate assets rather than helping workers, something we saw in the last financial crisis. Yes, we need to help employers to save jobs, but not without conditions.

In 2009, the federal and Ontario government spent $10.8 billion of taxpayer money bailing out General Motors to save jobs. A decade later, General Motors closed down the Oshawa assembly plant. Learning from this experience, the government should consider taking up long-term equity positions in return for injections of public capital into large and normally profitable corporations.

Business support could also come in the form of more serious short-term wage subsidies for businesses that commit to keeping their staff on the payroll. The 10% subsidy recently announced by the federal government will unfortunately do little to stop lay-offs in many sectors facing significant downturns right now. Other countries, such as Denmark, Sweden and New Zealand, are taking a more aggressive approach and subsidizing wages by half or more for businesses that don’t proceed with lay-offs. In doing so, they are smartly tying support for employers and employees together, making both more resilient during the crisis and therefore more capable of rebounding once it has passed.

There’s no denying we need a serious transition plan for workers in devastated sectors, but it should focus on major public investments in a Green New Deal rather than on bailouts to companies that won’t survive a long period of low oil and gas prices and serious global action to deal with climate change.

The federal and provincial governments deserves to be congratulated for actions to date. But we need a major national debate on the recovery package as it unfolds to ensure that it meets our shared goals for our economy and our society.

We should be careful about planning for the future we want rather than just shoring up the economy of today.

Andrew Jackson is a senior policy adviser and Katrina Miller is program director at the Broadbent Institute.

The post How to shore up workers struggling under COVID-19 and plan for the future we want appeared first on Corporate Knights.