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While schools, government offices, and plenty of other businesses have closed up shop for Easter Monday, if you're stuck at work today you can thank the fact that Canada has some of the worse vacation allowances in the industrialized world and the government has no plans to change it.

Canada currently sits in 19th place out of 21 industrialized nations when it comes to paid vacation time.

While many in B.C. are stuck working Easter Monday, their counterparts everywhere from the U.K. to Australia have been given the day off.

And, sadly B.C. has become a two-tier system – some get the day off, and others don't.

While the unions that represent public-sector workers, along with many others, negotiated Easter Monday as a statutory holiday long ago, the province of British Columbia doesn't recognize the day as a statutory holiday.

And surprisingly, there's also little appetite to push for change.

"I haven't sensed any strong push from groups other than ourselves," B.C. Employment Standards Coalition co-chair David Fairey told iNFOnews.ca. "I don't see it being a priority."

Fairey said his organization has been calling for the addition of Easter Monday as well as Boxing day and the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation to statutory holidays.

In a submission to the B.C. Minister of Labour in 2018 the B.C. Employment Standards Coalition pointed out that because many collective agreements included Easter Monday as a statutory holiday and many non-unionized employers also gave their staff the day off it made sense to make Easter Monday and Boxing Day a statutory holiday.

Unfortunately, the B.C. government didn't act.

And doesn't appear it will.

"B.C. is not currently considering establishing Easter Monday as a statutory holiday," the Ministry of Labour told iNFOnews.ca in an email.

Somewhat ironically the unionized staff member that sent the Email won't be working Easter Monday.

And the apathetic attitude that hasn't seen a move for a four-day long holiday over Easter isn't new.

Retired UBC Professor Dr. Mark Thompson was part of a team that reviewed B.C.'s Employment Standards Act in the early 1990s and said there wasn't a push to make Easter Monday a holiday then either.

"You had to be concerned about the cost to employers, the economy wasn't performing all that well, I was listening to the employers and the workers to what we ought to do with the law and it seemed to me the case for Easter Monday wasn't at all compelling," Thompson said.

However, Thompson does think British Columbians are missing out.

"It's all about politics... (and) I don't think they are going to be interested in bringing (B.C.) in line with the rest of the world," he said.

Thompson also thinks asking workers to work Easter Monday is pointless.

"Any company that wants to impose performance on that day is going to have problems," he said.

A graph of vacation leave from the 'No-Vacation Nation' paper by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research

Image Credit: Centre for Economic and Policy Research

Thompson said he was surprised at how little appetite there was for leisure time and paid time off from workers, although unions negotiated better deals so obviously demand from their members is there.

The question of why there's little appetite to push for more statutory holidays is hard to answer. It could be that people don't know what they are missing out on so they don't know what to ask for.

Fairey said the vast majority of those working on Easter Monday are working in the service sector.

"The service sector has a huge influence as they're going to open anyway," he said. "The employers are doing well... comparatively B.C. employers are getting away with lower cost factors."

Who is and who isn't working Easter Monday is hard to judge, as there are no readily available statistics on who gets Easter Monday off and who doesn't.

What's quite clear is that when it comes to vacation time, Canada is at the bottom of the league, and by a considerable amount.

Only the U.S. and Japan score more poorly than Canada in paid vacation time among industrialized countries.

Canadians get just two weeks per year of vacation time – except Saskatchewan which gets three.

Every other industrialized national gets a minimum of four weeks, and many get five weeks of paid vacation a year.

These countries also get around 10 statutory holidays, the same as B.C.

And the argument that Canadian or B.C. employers can't afford the extra vacation isn't valid, Fairey said.

"There's no question about that, there's no question that it's affordable," he said.

If everywhere from Germany to New Zealand can make it work, there's no reason Canada couldn't.

It doesn't stop the naysayers from trying though.

Prior to B.C.'s introduction of Family Day in 2012, the Fraser Institute opposed the idea saying it would cost families and taxpayers millions of dollars.

A decade later and the sky hasn't fallen.

It was Christy Clark's Liberal government that brought in Family Day, but anyone thinking that the left-leaning pro-labour NDP government would go to bat for more vacation will be disappointed.

"The Horgan government has shown it has no inclination to do anything about labour policy," Thompson said.

A recent report by the B.C. Employment Standards Coalition is highly critical of the government's ability to enforce its own Employment Standards Act.

While Fairey would like to see Easter Monday as a statutory holiday, he's pushing more to make the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation a statutory holiday.

And the Ministry of Labour said it was currently considering adding a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation statutory holiday.

While those wanting to spend more time with their family and friends will likely welcome that, unless they join a union, or have a willing company, they'll likely be working Easter Monday in the future. 

READ MORE: Four-day work week for tourism? Canadians might be asking the wrong question

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