Jennifer Whiteside started as B.C.’s labour minister right as the United States slammed Canada with a slew of hostile trade policies. She said President Donald Trump’s economic warfare has suddenly ramped up the pressure on British Columbians.
“Our world has really shifted in a way that, frankly, I never imagined that I would see in my lifetime,” she told The Tyee in a wide-ranging interview. “We are in a fundamentally different world in terms of the threats to our economy, the threat to our sovereignty, the threat to our way of life.”
As the legislature reconvenes for the first time since the election, the provincial government says thousands of jobs have been thrown into jeopardy. Whiteside said it has meant she had to shift her attention as soon as she stepped into office.
Whiteside has had a long career in labour. Before running for provincial office, she was chief spokesperson and lead negotiator for the Hospital Employees’ Union. In 2020, she was elected as MLA for New Westminster and has since held the Education and Mental Health and Addictions portfolios for the NDP.
She was re-elected in New Westminster-Coquitlam last year. Now, she will lead the BC NDP government on labour policy as trade, affordability and cost of living put pressure on employers and workers alike.
“This is an extraordinarily important time that we’re in,” she said. “It’s a time when we really need to stand up for working people and for our communities — that never changes for me.”
The Tyee sat down with Whiteside to ask how she plans to address a wide range of labour issues. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tyee: Economic uncertainty and U.S. tariffs are putting pressure on employers and workers alike as they struggle with the aftermath of rapid inflation and a higher cost of living. How will your government support workers?
Jennifer Whiteside: We were starting to experience some of the challenges around affordability before the pandemic hit. I think it was sort of an issue that was already bubbling.
In this landscape of deep volatility we are going into a period where there’s lots of labour activity. There’s been an increase in labour activity and union activity across the country over the last number of years, and I think that’s in response to the kinds of economic conditions that working people are experiencing.
We’re probably going to see that continue, because it’s going to continue to be a challenging environment. We have a significant deficit that our province is grappling with, and significant threats of as many as 124,000 jobs that could be lost over the course of four years, depending on what the tariff situation looks like.
We’re going to have to be pretty nimble to respond to the impact of what’s coming.
Premier [David] Eby has pulled people together — labour, businesses, the various ministries — to sit together at his tariff advisory committee to work on that path forward.
He has articulated that means we need to continue with a trade diversification agenda to grow the economy and make sure that we’re doing everything to protect good jobs for people, at the same time as strengthening the core services that people are relying on.
B.C. implemented new legislation for ride-hailing drivers last year, but drivers say the new laws aren’t working. They say they still have to spend long hours on the road to make a living. A review of these laws was in your mandate letter. What can British Columbians expect?
Our government is proud of the work that we’ve done to engage with app-based workers.
We really sat down with workers and looked at the Employment Standards Act, and looked at what kinds of rules we needed to put in place to start reconciling this asymmetrical relationship — this dynamic in the work process that is very outside of what our norms are.
For these workers to have access to workers’ compensation and for them to be considered employees under the act were very significant steps. We established a minimum wage for that work.
I think we’re still grappling to figure out — as that sector evolves, we need a process that ensures that we can continue to improve the framework for that sector. That is work that I’ve been tasked to do by the premier, and so we’ll be engaging with workers much as we did in the previous mandate.
As my predecessor Harry Bains did, I will engage with people who are actually working in that sector, understanding what kinds of challenges they continue to face, figure out what’s working well and what’s not working well and then look to see what some of the solutions are.
We’re framing that work up, and it’ll be underway very soon.
Do you have any specific changes, or is there anything specific that you expect might need to be changed?
It’s a little too soon to be able to speak in specifics. I haven’t had a chance to meet with many of these workers yet.
I did meet with some of them who were in my community, when parliamentary secretary Janet Routledge and then-labour minister Bains were engaged in the consultations with app-based workers. I sat in on one of their sessions and had a chance to talk with some of the workers. I will be doing that process again to really get into the details about how things are working for them.
The B.C. labour code review was finished last year but to date has not been made public. Why not?
Let me first start by referencing the 2018 labour code review. Up until 2018, it had been many years since the labour code had been reviewed.
I participated in the 2018 labour code review wearing a different hat, from a different perspective. There was extensive and very profoundly moving testimony from working people about their experiences, particularly from workers who work in sectors where there had been a lot of contract-flipping — notably health care and building services.
We certainly made some important changes to the code in 2018 to provide more in the way of successorship rights and to try to reduce some of the barriers people face being able to access unionization.
A little more than five years later we needed to check in and see how things were going, so we had a panel review the code. That panel submitted their report in August, and we had this little thing called an election in October last year.
Around the election, all of government shut down and we didn’t have an opportunity to do any of the regular business. Then it takes some time for government to get going again once we’ve concluded the electoral process.
So it’s not unusual. I don’t think that we’ve had a delay, because it’s really just the delay of having a new minister, of having to get the government back up and running.
The other major spanner in our works has been the tariffs, and the whole change in direction that we’ve experienced as a result of the very profound attack from the U.S. All of that has just really fed into the government having to be very nimble in responding to the priority of the day, which, I have to say, has been changing literally every day.
But the labour code review is very, very much at the top of my priority list. I do anticipate that we’ll see it out in the short to medium term, and then we’ll be working through the process of dealing with the recommendations.
Short to medium term — what does that mean?
We’ve just started a legislative session, so there’s now a whole lot of other things going on. I don’t want to let it sit too long, but we have a lot of balls in the air right now. I would say spring.
Health-care workers say their workplaces are understaffed and face retention issues, especially in rural B.C. How much is this a labour issue, and what role can the Labour Ministry take in addressing health-care pressures?
It’s not just health care. We have so many sectors of our labour force where we are experiencing shortages. They’re felt in a particularly acute way in health care because people need health care and because health care is all about providing services to people.
We have a health human resources plan that former minister Adrian Dix stewarded. We are training more doctors. We’re training more nurses. We have more health-care seats. When I was minister of mental health and addictions, we brought in a program to expedite the training of community mental health workers who are critical in terms of our mental health and addictions services.
We’re working on international credentialing to eliminate those barriers. We are in a new era in Canada in terms of our internal Canadian economy and reducing interprovincial trade barriers.
One of the interprovincial barriers is credential recognition. The Labour Ministry doesn’t have direct responsibility for those issues, but I’m certainly doing everything that I can to support my colleagues.
Health care has been also impacted by federal government decisions around immigration and around the provincial nominee program.
We’ve heard from the Hospital Employees’ Union about how those changes negatively affect health-care staffing. What’s your reaction?
We’re very concerned about the fact that we have 500 health-care workers here right now under that program, who are likely not going to be able to continue to be here.
Ontario and Quebec have pay equity legislation for private sector employers that specifically makes gender-based wage discrimination illegal. B.C. does not. Last year, women in B.C. earned on average 15 per cent less than men. Federal labour data shows we have a bigger pay gap than any other province except Alberta. How will you address pay equity?
Not only do we have an unacceptable 15 per cent gap based on gender, but we know that the pay gap is expansive also for Indigenous workers and for workers of colour.
This is an issue that we took on in the last mandate with our pay transparency legislation, which is meant to gather data and have some transparency in terms of finding where we are really seeing the wage gap, so that we can have that information to inform subsequent decisions. Those pieces fall under the Ministry of Finance.
But I would just say that there is no question that we are moving forward with the pay transparency piece. The expansion of the requirement for employers to report pay equity will be very helpful going forward in figuring out how we can address an unacceptable pay gap based on gender.
