TORONTO – Sitting at the Saving Gigi Café on Bloor Street West, surrounded by young people working on their laptops, Andrew Cash was reflecting on the all-too-precarious existence faced by an increasing number of Canadians.

People lurching from contract to contract. People forced to work two or even three part-time jobs to make ends meet. People who are working the equivalent of full time but who don’t qualify for employment insurance, maternity leaves or a mortgage.

“If you peel back what looks like middle-class stability in a lot of workers, what you actually see is that most people are a bike accident away from the abyss, from financial crisis,” said the former NDP MP.

As a Member of Parliament, Cash pushed for better conditions for workers, including unpaid interns. Now, defeated in the last election and back in Toronto full time, Cash has returned to the kind of advocacy work that led him to Parliament in the first place.

Last week, he launched the Urban Worker Project, an initiative to call attention to the plight of many workers caught in the growing disconnect between today’s increasingly precarious job scene and government programs, which are still structured on the presumption that most Canadians have full time work with job security.

“I think that we have to really first say that work has fundamentally changed and as much as I hate to say this, it’s not going back to the way it used to be,” Cash explained.

Cash says that the post-war economic framework that Canada built its social safety net upon — the norm of full-time work for people employed by the same private or public sector institution for an entire career, earning enough to buy a house, raise a family, retire with a pension and a dignified retirement no longer applies.

“All of those things are not on anymore for most new workers and increasingly for older workers too,” said the former professional musician. “If you’re not in the public sector and a few very large private sector employers, you can’t access those things anymore.”

According to Statistics Canada, the number of temporary or contract workers in Canada has been rising at more than twice the rate of traditional, so called, permanent jobs. While the number of permanent jobs rose 7.2 per cent between 2009 and 2014, the number of temporary jobs rose 15.4 per cent. The biggest rise was in term or contract jobs which were up 19.8 per cent.

Cash estimates that in some parts of the country, like the Greater Toronto Area, roughly half of residents are working in temporary, contract or part-time jobs.

MaryAnn Mihychuk, federal minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour, agrees that it is a problem — a problem that is on the government’s radar, saying that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau included an Employment Insurance review in her mandate letter.

“It is also something that has been raised by the labour department, saying we have a group of individuals that are not being covered by the insurance program that they pay into,” said Mihycuk. “So it’s a big, big problem.”

Mihychuk plans to initiate “a round of broad-thinking consultations.” She hopes to introduce the next round of employment insurance consultations in 2017 along with changes to the labor code.

“So, any review of these kinds of issues, the timing is perfect and feeds right in,” she said of Cash’s initiative. “I look forward to seeing what he is recommending.”

One of the first challenges for the government will be to get more information on just how the workplace has changed and how it is affecting Canadians, says Cash.

“It’s an easy issue to ignore because it is so hard to identify these workers sometimes. They don’t all collect in one physical location. They don’t look the same. They don’t do the same kind of work. They are young, they are old, they’re professionals, they are unskilled laborers.

“They run the gamut from contract professors to low wage temp agency workers and yet they all have these issues of no access to a pension, no benefits, no job security.”

For many of those who find themselves in that situation, employment insurance and maternity leave are also out of reach – either because they don’t log enough hours or because they are on contract and considered self-employed.

One of the first campaigns the Urban Workers Project is launching is focused on fairer conditions for contract workers, to include them in employment standards legislation so that “solo self-employed, freelance and contract workers can access better pay, benefits and protections.”

To date, the online petition has collected 498 signatures.

“Part of our first campaign, around fairness for contract workers, is dealing with the misclassification of workers,” Cash explained, adding that in many cases, someone who is an independent contractor is actually in fact, under the law, really an employee.

“Often times it’s your sole client that you actually go in to work at and many of the conditions of what an employee is fall under those definitions. And yet you’re still being paid as an independent contractor.”

“I think we have a lot of slack in the system that we could tighten up.”

Among those who are falling into the category of contract workers are many university lecturers who go from semester to semester with little or no job security.

“Fifty per cent of the faculty are precarious workers too and that’s a fundamental change in academia,” Cash said. “It could be August 15 and you don’t know whether you’re teaching at a university on September 6.”

Another area where jobs have become more precarious is in government, said Cash. In recent years, the public service has cut back full time jobs and often used temporary help agencies or contract work to fill the gap.

“In the public sector more and more departments are moving to outsourcing or contract work.”

“It’s a big issue for public sector workers, this push to contract out and it’s happening everywhere.”

Service Canada, the federal government’s one-stop counter for everything from dealing with employment insurance applications to dealing with pension problems, also has to make changes to deal with the new reality for many people, such as problems when self-employed workers have to prove their hours, Cash said.

“If you try to deal with things like Service Canada as a self-employed or freelancer sometimes it is very challenging because they just aren’t set up for it.”

Getting a mortgage when you’re self-employed or on contract rather a traditional 40-hour a week permanent job is another challenge, he pointed out.

“You see it in financial services, a real issue around a lack of understanding about what this sector is about because you can’t walk into an institution sometimes with a very clean T4. You just can’t do it. It’s not going to actually reflect your income.”

Cash is looking forward to the government funding studies into the problem and Parliament addressing the issues brought about by the changes in the employment market.

“The reality of this issue and how it affects people spans the partisan divides. The solutions will not necessarily span the partisan divides but it’s hard to argue against the reality that is right in front of our face right now.”

[email protected]