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Women are more likely to work less than 30 hours per week with no benefits. Young workers, or those below 35 years of age, are less likely to have workplace pensions, or sick leave.

Racialized workers, non-citizens, those whose first language is other than English or French, are far more likely to be precariously employed. This is not the way to build a better Canada.

Our campaigns and political action work are an important part of this fight, but we must never lose sight of the most powerful tool we have. We must organize these workers, allowing them the single best way to fight precarity and inequality in the workplace – a union.

Deliver pharmacare

Fix Employment Insurance.

It should, for instance, reform the labour code so all workers get a minimum level of paid sick leave.

CivicAction also lists income inequality and job insecurity as contributing factors for mental health issues. Wayne Lewchuk, a professor at McMaster University who has studied precarious labour extensively, said its strain goes beyond a worker’s schedule and employment status. “You’re less likely to have friends at work because you’re moving from workplace to workplace,” Lewchuk said. “Your support system is weaker.”

full-time employment during each recession was, in many ways, permanent," Tal wrote in the report. The findings come as no surprise to professors who study Canada's labour market. "There's been this idea that now that oil prices are low and the dollar is low and now we'll see these big plants come back to Canada. I think that's overly optimistic," said Mike Moffatt, assistant professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. "The big takeaway from this is that the issues that we have in Canada and Ontario, in particular, aren't just recession-based. Policy-makers need to figure out other ways of economic growth and job growth that don't just assume those manufacturing jobs are coming back." The number of self-employed workers rose four times faster than the number of paid employees during the year-ended January 2015, CIBC noted in the report.

While self-employment can provide flexibility and other advantages, it is considered to be of lower quality because on average it pays less than salaried positions. The number of low-paying jobs has risen faster than the number of mid-paying jobs, which in turn has risen faster than the number of high-paying jobs. In the last year, the number of low-paying full-time positions rose twice as fast as the number of high-paying positions, CIBC said. Over the past decade, wages in high-paying sectors rose almost twice as fast as wages in low-paying sectors. "In other words, the fastest-growing segment of the labour market is also the one with the weakest bargaining power," Tal wrote. Unemployment insurance, the Canada Pension Plan, as well as health care, education, and child care, were built to suit the labour market from the 1960s and 1970s, when a single breadwinner had a good-paying job with steady income, hours, and benefits that could support an entire family, said Wayne Lewchuk, a professor at McMaster University who has researched precarious employment.

"I think we're coming to terms with the fact that we have the wrong institutions for a modern labour market," Lewchuk said. "If we get the institutions right, then these people who are precarious, they become flexible employees. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and the supports are around them make this a viable way of operating." Lewchuk points to the public discourse around the perils of precarious employment, as well as the proposed Ontario pension plan, the Canadian Skills Training and Employment Coalition, and worker protection legislation passed last year, as evidence of change, Lewchuk said. "It has taken 20 or 30 years for us to get here. It will take that kind of time to move away. But I think the momentum has shifted," Lewchuk said. "There are all kinds of reasons to be optimistic but it's going to take time and it's going to be through struggle."

They carried signs saying they're not being treated equally because of a new scheduling system, which was set up as a response to complaints about Ambulance New Brunswick not meeting its legal requirements to serve patients in the language of their choice.

Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 4848.

But under the new system, Ambulance New Brunswick calls bilingual part-time or casual employees first. Then it calls in full-time bilingual staff on overtime. Only when it can't find anyone else does it resort to unilingual employees.

That's a huge issue for our casual and part-time employees," Piercy said.

And on Dec. 2, Ambulance NB administrators across the province received new directions on how to fill vacant shifts. If a person calls in sick, or someone has requested vacation time and they must be replaced, the manager in charge of scheduling that shift would offer the shift to anyone with bilingual qualifications in the person's station, typically first part-time or casual employees. Unfortunately, there is a shortage of bilingual part-time or casual employees in many parts of the province. So the next group to receive offers is bilingual full-time employees, who would be called in for an overtime shift. If nobody is available, the offer is extended to bilingual paramedics from other jurisdictions.

That's not fair to the many dedicated unilingual paramedics across the province, says Trent Piercy, a paramedic with Ambulance NB and the secretary for paramedics' union CUPE Local 4848. "They are going to get offers, but it's going to come after that process has been exhausted," he said. Piercy said he understands that Ambulance NB has a legal obligation to offer service in both official languages.

But he said that if an ambulance arrives at the scene of an accident, makes the offer of service in both languages and learns that it can't provide care in the language requested, he believes Ambulance NB is still meeting its legal requirement if those unilingual paramedics request another crew with bilingual capabilities to respond to the scene. While they wait for them to arrive, he said, they can use existing translation services until that backup arrives.

"If we have another crew coming, is that not offering the service? If we offer translation, or have somebody come from one of our crews to translate on a call, is that not offering the service? Other avenues, I don't think, have been explored enough." Piercy said Ambulance NB has set a goal to have 60 per cent of its paramedics be able to offer service in both official languages. He believes that only about 35 per cent of the province's paramedics are currently bilingual. "It's going to take a very, very long time to get up there and the costs are going to go up," he said. The paramedics' union has filed a grievance about new hiring practices introduced in August 2014, which place new weight behind a candidate's linguistic abilities.

After having already expressed frustration with the challenges posed by those changes, he said, the provincial ambulance service has now made it more difficult for unilingual paramedics to find meaningful employment in the province, rather than trying to work through a long list of suggestions submitted by the union as potential alternatives to the new scheduling protocols. The union suggested finding ways to screen calls by language, making it possible to send ambulances with bilingual staff to scenes where a specific language is requested, and to explore translation equipment for use in provincial ambulances. Other ideas involved lowering the language requirements to a conversational level of French or English, alter the deployment protocols to keep unilingual ambulances away from areas that might require them to provide care in their weaker language, or improve language training resources for existing paramedics. Currently Ambulance NB has offered to cover the costs of distance-education language training from the Université de Moncton or Rosetta Stone, though the employee must complete the work on his or her own time.

But Piercy said so far the provincial service hasn't been willing to commit to exploring any of these ideas. "We will continue to work with stakeholders to find solutions that will best meet the needs of our patients and employees, while respecting our legal obligation," he said. The Daily Gleaner requested an interview with Katherine d'Entremont, the commissioner of official languages for New Brunswick, but was informed she declined to comment on this story.

While speaking with the paper about Ambulance NB's push to improve its language capabilities in August 2014, d'Entremont said the legal obligation to provide service in both official languages has been in place since before Ambulance NB launched in 2007. Back then, she said it wasn't her job to tell the provincial ambulance service or the Department of Health how the organization should reach its language goals, but simply to make recommendations on how to address deficiencies identified by the public. "I'm interested in the results of a plan as opposed to the means to get there," she said at the time. "My mandate is very specific in this regard. So once I've made recommendations, the rest is up to the institutions concerned."

Both Dominic Cardy, leader of the New Democratic Party of New Brunswick, and Kris Austin, leader of the People's Alliance of New Brunswick party, attended a rally co-ordinated by frustrated paramedics in Fredericton this week. Afterwards, Austin said he feels the way Ambulance NB is bolstering its language capabilities is flawed, saying that it unnecessarily punishes many qualified francophone and anglophone paramedics by freezing them out in favour of the smaller complement of bilingual professionals. The newspaper asked the Department of Health if Health Minister Victor Boudreau wanted to comment on the paramedic protests, but was told he was unavailable.