{"id":266299,"date":"2018-06-13T10:31:38","date_gmt":"2018-06-13T14:31:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/issues\/future-of-work-isnt-just-elite-chatter\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T22:07:21","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T02:07:21","slug":"future-of-work-isnt-just-elite-chatter","status":"publish","type":"issues","link":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/fr\/2018\/06\/future-of-work-isnt-just-elite-chatter\/","title":{"rendered":"Future of work isn\u2019t just elite chatter"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the political honeymoon days for the Liberals following the 2015 election, CBC\u2019s The National<\/em> did a pretty cool TV experiment<\/a> where they let individual Canadians interview Justin Trudeau. One of those interviews was done by a struggling worker from the London, ON area named Neil Piercey. Piercey told Trudeau that he had lost his good manufacturing job years earlier when the company pulled up stakes and left for Mexico. He had used up his RRSP savings to pay his mortgage and was working at a low-paying job.<\/p>\n

\u201cCertain jobs you just can\u2019t apply for,\u201d Piercey told the PM. \u201cI can\u2019t go and intern. I can\u2019t go and apply for certain jobs\u2026It\u2019s not easy. If there are no more manufacturing jobs, and that\u2019s mostly my experience all my life, where am I supposed to go?\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, Trudeau didn\u2019t offer any great answers. He said a few things about talking to big international companies about setting up shop in Canada, and about improving the Canada Pension Plan.<\/p>\n

According to my new premier Doug Ford\u2019s campaign trail promises, the solutions to the province\u2019s problems lie in keeping money in taxpayers\u2019 pocketbooks, including making gas cheaper and giving minimum-wage-earners like Piercey a break on paying taxes. It\u2019s a well-worn 1980s-era cassette that gets hauled out every four years by one politician or another.<\/p>\n

Ford, and many politicians before him, campaigned against \u201cout-of-touch\u201d elites and picked up on peoples\u2019 sense that the overall government system was rigged to ignore people like Neil Piercey. Stephen Harper liked to campaign against the media, academics and bureaucrats, and the message resonated. I don\u2019t have to review what happened in the United States.<\/p>\n

But the anti-elite themes and the pocketbook promises that inevitably go with them are doing a great disservice to Ontarians in 2018, even if the approach seems to work quite well for the politicians come election time.<\/p>\n

A buck a beer, \u201cNo carbon taxes!\u201d and cheaper gas all sound lovely, but what do you really<\/em> do about people who trained for jobs that no longer exist? How will you ensure that high school kids in Timmins and Kenora and Perth are learning the skills that match with the labour market, which is constantly going through convulsions and revolutions? Offer them a cheap Coors Light?<\/p>\n

The future of work, education and skills training are neither elite nor liberal issues.<\/p>\n

A 2017 study<\/a> of the impact of robots on German jobs shows that while workers managed to shift to the new types of employment (note that German firms and unions work together on reskilling, unlike ours), robots ultimately had a negative impact on wages. The authors also find that it was harder for new workers to get jobs, and this is another factor contributing to the threat of rising inequality due to technological change<\/a> being discussed around the world.<\/p>\n

The international consulting firm BDO earlier this year predicted that robots<\/a> would replace 50 percent of mining jobs by 2020, a trend directly relevant to many Ontario workers. A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute<\/a> on the impact of automation estimated that up to one-third of the workforce in advanced economies will need to reskill and find new work.<\/p>\n

Cutting business taxes, slowing down the minimum wage hike, and slashing red tape, which Ford promised, also sound logical, because helping entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized businesses will create more jobs.<\/p>\n

But what about some of the more complex challenges facing business in Ontario and Canada, such as the shortage of venture capital<\/a> for scaling up innovative new ideas, the need to protect Canadian intellectual property<\/a> overseas, the shortages of skilled workers for cutting-edge jobs, the decline in business research and development<\/a>? How do you encourage companies to innovate, to go digital, so they can compete globally? What happens to people living in outlying and rural areas when the good new jobs cluster in the big centres?<\/p>\n

As the Munk School\u2019s David Wolfe recently wrote<\/a> of the world\u2019s new \u201cplatform economy,\u201d \u201cWhat we sell in the future. . .may be fewer hard goods, and more intelligent software with a\u00a0myriad of applications in business and consumer markets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ontarians aren\u2019t stupid \u2014 they see what is unfolding. At the grocery store, there are fewer workers; every day more of the checkout lanes are run by machines. Ditto for the warehouses.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ontarians aren\u2019t stupid \u2014 they see what is unfolding. At the grocery store, there are fewer workers<\/a>; every day more of the checkout lanes are run by machines. Ditto for the warehouses. The taxis have been replaced with Uber and Lyft drivers. Many workers (roughly half of them in the Greater Toronto Area<\/a>) are in precarious work situations and don\u2019t have the benefits workers used to have. There is more and more talk about trucking jobs going extinct<\/a>. Nobody\u2019s quite sure what to take at college or university.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the thing about anti-elite campaigns: the elites are going to make out just fine. The cover story in June\u2019s Atlantic<\/em> <\/a>\u00a0magazine explores the \u201cnew American aristocracy,\u201d the 9.9 percent of citizens who hold most of the wealth in the country, and how it\u2019s getting increasingly difficult for the rest of the population to climb up the socio-economic ladder. Things are better in Canada, where there is more income redistribution, but intergenerational income mobility also depends on where you live in this country, as Canadian economist Miles Corak has documented<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While Ford talked about giving Ontarians beer for a buck, the elites were at their conferences. They were discussing automation, artificial intelligence, the gig economy, and how to better educate children and train workers for a labour market and marketplace that is unclear, but that will most definitely be radically different from what we know today.<\/p>\n

Ford will find many Conservatives in Ontario\u2019s corporate sector who have first-hand knowledge of the changing job market and the rising platform economy, and he should draw from their expertise. The future of work and the changing marketplace is a conversation everyone in Ontario should join.<\/p>\n

Photo: Ontario Premier-elect Doug Ford speaks to supporters in Toronto on June 7, 2018, after winning a majority government in the provincial election 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS, by Mark Blinch.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

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In the political honeymoon days for the Liberals following the 2015 election, CBC\u2019s The National did a pretty cool TV experiment where they let individual Canadians interview Justin Trudeau. One of those interviews was done by a struggling worker from the London, ON area named Neil Piercey. Piercey told Trudeau that he had lost his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":257542,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","ep_exclude_from_search":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"2025-10-08T02:07:24Z","apple_news_api_id":"a47964b5-687b-463b-8e74-aa95a109849b","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2025-10-08T02:07:24Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/ApHlktWh7RjuOdKqVoQmEmw","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false},"categories":[9362,9358,9372],"tags":[9237],"article-status":[],"irpp-category":[4245,4374,4295],"section":[],"irpp-tag":[],"class_list":["post-266299","issues","type-issues","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economie","category-politique","category-recent-stories-fr","tag-intelligence-artificielle","irpp-category-economie","irpp-category-innovation","irpp-category-politique"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\nFuture of work isn\u2019t just elite chatter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/fr\/2018\/06\/future-of-work-isnt-just-elite-chatter\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"fr_FR\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Future of work isn\u2019t just elite chatter\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In the political honeymoon days for the Liberals following the 2015 election, CBC\u2019s The National did a pretty cool TV experiment where they let individual Canadians interview Justin Trudeau. 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