A crowdfunding campaign for paid sick leave in Ontario is gaining steam — but should sick leave be a charitable cause?

Lindsay Clarke, a registered nurse in Toronto, expected the Ontario government’s response to the province’s third wave of COVID-19 would include mandatory paid sick days. When Premier Doug Ford stepped in front of the cameras on April 16, they weren’t even on the agenda. 

Despite a year of advocates, experts, and even the province’s Science Table calling for paid sick days, Ford instead essentially gave Ontario police forces free reign to card anyone outside of their home. He did not announce widespread closures of high-risk sectors like manufacturing and warehousing that could have slowed the spread of COVID-19, and workers in these industries often cannot afford to stay home if they’re sick. Clarke believed she needed to act. “The fund started because we saw there was this emergent need to help essential workers stay home to help curb this third wave,” she says.  

Clarke and her friend Connie Cameron, another registered nurse, had been toying with the idea of creating a fund to help workers who needed to isolate, but did not have access to paid sick days. The day after Ford’s announcement, Clarke stumbled across a GoFundMe page set up by Jasmine Shaw, a systems engineer, to raise money for essential workers without paid sick leave. “We’d never met before,” Clarke says. But she reached out and offered to help out. Just two days after Ford’s press conference, the Ontario Sick Day Relief Project was born.

“A community fund is not a solution to this,” Clarke stressed. “It needs a much more robust government policy approach.”

In bold letters on its website, the Ontario Sick Day Relief Project says it is not a replacement for a government-mandated sick leave policy. “A community fund is not a solution to this,” Clarke stressed. “It needs a much more robust government policy approach.” Ford said on April 22 he will implement some sort of paid sick leave policy, although he gave almost no details about when it would launch. In the absence of an immediate provincial paid sick leave plan, should someone else — be it grassroots organizers or the charitable sector — step up to the plate?

Donors began chipping in to the Project’s GoFundMe almost immediately. “By Monday morning, there was over $20,000 in the fund,” Clarke says. “That rate of donations really continued through those first 48 hours.”As of Friday afternoon, the Project had raised $49,581 for essential workers across the province. Clarke says they include grocery, agriculture, and food manufacturing staff — all sectors that are seeing very high rates of workplace infection in Ontario. More than 100 people have applied to receive anywhere from one to five “sick day” payments of $160, a rate roughly equivalent to a $20/hr wage for an eight-hour workday. Only a handful have actually received grants so far, Clarke says, thanks to some delays with verifying and distributing the money. 

But demand has far exceeded supply. Three days after the Project’s website went live, it had to stop accepting applications. That was still the case as of April 23, and Clarke says it isn’t clear when the Project will be able to resume. “At this point, I can’t necessarily say because with the number of applicants…there’s already a gap,” she says. “We want to be able to fill that gap before we open up again.” 

Many social sector leaders believe the only ethical way to deliver paid sick days is through government — not charitable — intervention. “It needs to stay with the government,” says Ausma Malik, director of advocacy and organizing at the Atkinson Foundation. “It is a systemic problem, and we’ve seen that play out throughout this crisis. It requires a systemic solution without delay.” A statement from Cathy Taylor, executive director of the Ontario Nonprofit Network, concurs. “All employees should have access to paid sick days and the only way to ensure the process is equitable and accessible is to have government legislate it as an employment standard,” the statement says. 

Deena Ladd, executive director of the Workers Action Centre, says she appreciates the sentiments of anyone willing to organize a crowdfunding campaign to raise sick pay for essential workers. That said, she says those efforts simply will not be enough to help essential workers in Ontario. They won’t even come close. “Crowdsourcing $40,000 to get out to a couple of hundred workers who can navigate the Internet, who can read English, who can fill out application forms, who have access to WiFi — that’s going to be great for them,” Ladd says. “But there are hundreds of thousands of workers across this province that need enforced paid sick days.” 

To her, focusing on crowdfunding campaigns could give the Ontario government an excuse to abdicate on its responsibility to provide paid sick leave to all workers. Officials might simply point to them as viable support systems for vulnerable workers rather than acknowledging them for what they really are — acts of desperation in the face of a complete lack of guaranteed paid sick leave. “$40,000 is not going to go to a lot of people,” Ladd says. “Even $100,000. Even $200,000. A lot of workers are not going to see a cent of that.” 

Clarke says she isn’t a workers’ rights expert, but doesn’t believe the Ontario government can use the Project as an opt-out. “Our funding doesn’t have enough money in it for the government to point to it and say — here’s a solution,” she says. “We’ve been very clear that this is an emergency relief fund that we’re running through the stay-at-home order. We’re trying to just meet an urgent need.” Clarke says any money left in the fund after May 20, the date Ontario’s latest stay-at-home order expires, will be distributed to an organization that advocates on behalf of workers. 

Ladd believes the public should focus on pressuring the Ontario government to implement a paid sick day program, while donating to non-profits and charities who already work with low-wage or precarious workers — including the Workers Action Centre. Last year, they partnered with FoodShare, a food security organization, to distribute emergency food boxes to around 250 families in need every Saturday. 

Everyone interviewed for this story agreed that paid sick leave is something the government must implement — and that sick leave shouldn’t become a charitable cause. That said, there is a history of non-profits and charities stepping in to offer short-term solutions to problems such as hunger, only to find themselves becoming the de facto solution to these crises. Food banks were never intended to be permanent, yet they are now fixtures of food security policy in Ontario. 

It is not clear whether the same can be said of paid sick leave. Before the pandemic, only Quebec and PEI required employers to provide paid sick days. (Ontario Premier Doug Ford scrapped two mandatory paid sick days shortly after taking office in 2018). Yet the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that, if anything, paid sick days are more than just individual protection for workers — they are critical public health policies. 

The Workers Action Centre continues to run an information hotline for workers, explanations of Ontario’s employment standards acts in a variety of languages, and even provides direct cash assistance to workers thanks to unrestricted grants by supportive foundations. Ladd says they gave around $100,000 in 2020 — but this money has since dried up. “The kinds of federal dollars that came to community groups is just not there,” she says. “It all got used up last year.” 

Much of that cash, however, isn’t to compensate for sick days. The biggest expense of the workers Ladd’s organization helps isn’t even about sick leave: “It’s about rent,” she says. Many of the workers who seek out help are undocumented and wouldn’t be covered by Ontario’s worker legislation anyways. “A lot of the workers who are going to work sick need to just get their pay packets from their employers without interruption,” Ladd says. 

The fund run by Clarke and her teammates may be the difference between safe isolation and exposure at work for any workers who do successfully apply.

However, the fund run by Clarke and her teammates may be the difference between safe isolation and exposure at work for any workers who do successfully apply, especially in the absence of any firm deadline on a provincial sick leave plan. Ladd is still convinced that political pressure is the only tactic that matters right now. “I think the government is crumbling…not because of the crowdfunding,” she says. “They’re in a crisis because people are outraged and are organizing and putting pressure on the government.” 

Clarke and her team admit they are not experts in organizing or fundraising. She says the Project is reaching out to other mutual aid organizations who are looking to offer similar support to essential workers, although no formal partnerships are in the works. The Project also encourages anyone who is eligible for the Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit (CRSB), which offers $500 for up to a total of four weeks, to apply. 

In the meantime, workers will continue to arrive on-the-job with symptoms because they cannot afford to remain at home — potentially infecting their co-workers, families, and friends. And while the Ontario government has promised to introduce paid sick leave (with Ford insisting it would be the best plan in North America), it will likely be a temporary and potentially even insufficient policy. Ford has opposed paid sick leave for his entire term as premier. David Hains, deputy editor of QP Briefing, an Ontario outlet covering the province’s legislature, estimated in a Twitter post that the Ford government had voted down at least 20 opposition motions calling for paid sick leave by mid-April.  

“Hearing all the calls of experts from the Science Table, from the medical community, and healthcare organizations — it just felt like something needed to be done quickly,” Clarke says.

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