It will be my pleasure.
Fortunately, when it comes to salary, Canadian law does not allow discrimination against a person based on their date of hire. This is a legislative change that was made in 2018 in the Canada Labour Code.
However, it is still possible to grant less advantageous ancillary working conditions to some workers, simply because of their date of hire. We are therefore concerned that the current economic context will encourage the emergence of orphan clauses and that when young people enter the labour market, they will be offered less advantageous conditions than other colleagues doing exactly the same work. We fear that this is a kind of solution that employers will use to cope with the difficult economic situation.
We know that it is possible to legislate to address this issue. A good example is what was done in Quebec, where a bill was introduced and passed to prohibit orphan clauses that affect ancillary working conditions. It is therefore no longer possible to create these new clauses. We believe that the federal government should follow Quebec's lead in this regard. It has already done so for salaries, but there are still certain conditions that could be less attractive for young people, for example, pension plans, to which you alluded.
It is important to protect ourselves and to work upstream. We often talk about finding solutions, but the government must also act upstream, sometimes, to prevent this type of situation. Since the current economic context favours the use of such clauses, we must act upstream and close the gap.