BC NDP dragged for half-holiday measure for the Queen's funeral

John Horgan/BC Gov Flickr | Alessia Pierdomenico/Shutterstock

Premier John Horgan is facing backlash from furious parents and a confused public over his government’s decision not to create a statutory holiday for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II on September 19.

The government announced Tuesday it would close schools and award a statutory holiday only to public sector workers — everyone from core government employees to post-secondary professors to those who work in the health care sector. But it chose not to extend that stat to everyone else in the private sector.

The result is Horgan’s half-assed, half-holiday.

Thousands of parents whose kids aren’t in class on September 19 still have to go to work, which has created enormous headaches over childcare. And that has, in turn, created an avalanche of negative reactions against the government.

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Horgan has stayed quiet since the contentious announcement.

The only communication was a statement from his office that was so vague and poorly written that for at least an hour after it was released Tuesday, almost nobody in the province knew what it meant or what was actually going on.

Half of BC’s media interpreted the premier’s statement the wrong way and began erroneously reporting that Horgan had actually called a new holiday.

As communications rollouts go, it was an amateur hour disaster.

Privately, New Democrats claim their hands were tied once Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared the Queen’s funeral a national day of mourning and awarded a day off to federal government employees. Trudeau also stopped short of creating a national holiday that would have applied to everyone.

Ottawa’s move triggered several “me-too” clauses for some BC public-sector unions, which have collective agreements that automatically give them any new days off awarded by the federal government to its workers.

That created a bizarre dynamic for BC’s schools.

Janitors, bus drivers, secretaries and special education workers automatically got the Queen’s funeral as a holiday because their union, CUPE, had contract language to match the federal holiday.

But the BC Teachers’ Federation did not.

The Horgan government claims it then had no choice but to close schools because teachers could not run the schools without support staff.

Yet the government did, in fact, have other choices.

It could have given the CUPE school workers holiday pay to work on Monday and keep the schools open.

Or, the government could have decided it was unfair to jam parents with an unexpected care day and declared that day a statutory holiday for everyone.

It chose to do neither.

Part of the reason appears to be BC’s business community, which was lobbying hard behind the scenes to avoid a full-blown statutory holiday because of the payroll costs and disruption to operations.

Normally, New Democrats would have little appetite to listen to business owners complain about profits and the cost of paying employees appropriate wages.

But the NDP was not thrilled at the fallout of the Queen’s death anyway — it interrupted Horgan’s plans to stump in the Surrey South by-election, disrupted the continued rollout of his cost-of-living affordability plan and prevented his health minister from announcing changes to the ambulance service in front of a frustrated crowd at the Union of BC Municipalities meeting in Whistler.

So suddenly the NDP was very keen indeed on listening to the concerns of the business community. As the old saying goes, politics often makes for strange bedfellows.

In the end, BC’s half-holiday decision boiled down to a multitude of factors: collective agreements, financial considerations, political calculations, and business concerns.

The Horgan government, as it often does, tried to side-step making a definitive and hard decision on an issue in favour of a weird half-measure that pleased no one and left a series of entirely new problems and headaches in its wake.

Rob is Daily Hive’s Political Columnist, tackling the biggest political stories in BC. You can catch him on CHEK News as their on-air Political Correspondent.