Once upon a time, people in Canada (and across North America) would get a job, working for an identifiable single employer, and often stay in that job for an entire career.

Their employer would provide them a salary, and generally they could expect a level of security and stability in exchange for their work, an expectation that was often protected by labour unions. Their employer would provide them with extended health and dental benefits, life and disability insurance, a pension plan to take care of their needs when they retired, even paid vacation — all of this on top of the income security of a steady paycheque that stayed the same (and rose with inflation, more or less) through the ups and downs of the business cycle.

And they all lived happily ever after. More or less.

Sometimes the fairy tale narrative was disrupted, of course — a company would go out of business, or suffer big losses and implement massive layoffs, or people would get fired — but the norm was standard enough that the government built its social safety net around these exceptions and around the expectation of a full-time career job for everyone. It offered labour protections that governed workplace standards. It offered insurance against limited spells of unemployment. It sometimes targeted subsidies to industries that employed many people. And it reluctantly offered deep subsistence income and minimal lifestyle supplements to those who “fell through the cracks” and found themselves locked out of the normal employment cycle.

It seems increasingly clear that old sense of what’s normal — the one around which we have built our entire economy — is becoming a thing of the past, a quaint folk tale about how the fairy godmother rewarded hard work and sincere wishes by turning a pumpkin into a defined-benefit pension plan.

The news has been coming all the time for decades, bit by bit, signalling the end of this jobs-based society. Just this week, for instance, the Wellesley Institute reported that one-third of Ontario employees receive no dental and prescription drug benefits through their employers. A Sun Life survey found that a third of employees report having no workplace pension plan and that the number of people who expect to have to continue working beyond age 65 has doubled since 2008. Meanwhile, a report from the Mowat Centre on the rise of so-called “sharing economy” services such as Uber and Airbnb says that the transition of workers into pseudo-entrepreneurial roles means the government needs to consider how this “opens up new gaps or creates new pressures on Canada’s social architecture.”

We’ve heard a lot about how technology has enabled the emergence of this new “sharing economy” or how global business trends point to a rising “gig economy.” Sometimes this vision of every worker as an independent agent — an economy of small-business people — is breathlessly heralded as a breakthrough, a relief from a locked-in paternalistic relationship with powerful employers. Other times, perhaps more often, it is characterized as a rise in “precarious employment.”

It may be both, liberating and precarious simultaneously, but whether it is good or bad to degrees, it is reality. One 2013 study by the United Way showed that half of Toronto workers are now in “precarious” employment. We are emerging into what appears to be, at least seen through the lens of our fairy tale past, essentially a post-jobs economy.

It’s not at all clear that we or our governments are fully preparing for the implications of this. It seems that every election brings new promises of jobs-jobs-jobs, but little talk of how to support or regulate an environment where many people sell their labour as a normal commodity in short-term contracts with businesses and other people. It’s fine to talk about the liberating potential of freelance life, and crowdfunding, and Internet marketplaces that turn hobbies into careers and where everyone is their own boss, but it is clear that most people lack both the financial capital and the foresight to evaluate and insulate themselves from the risks of that kind of market.

Kathleen Wynne’s promise in the last election of a provincial pension plan seems to hint at an awareness of the problem. But in its isolation as a proposed solution to a whole suite of emerging challenges, it also seems indicative of what the Mowat report calls (in discussing regulation of emerging service marketplaces) a whack-a-mole approach.

One answer to the broader problem would be to rebuild our social safety net in the absence of the expectation that people will have an employer. A series of government-provided social programs (such as we have now with health care and old age security) or mandated private programs (as we have now with car insurance) could offer people the security the old job market provided. Perhaps labour legislation can somehow be rewritten for a world of temporary contracts and multiple “customers” in the role once played by one “employer.”

There’s room for a robust debate about what shape such a set of policies could take, but it’s getting late in the game for that debate to begin. It will be interesting to see if the focus on the middle class in the upcoming federal election confronts the reality of the economy that today’s and (especially) tomorrow’s middle class face.

The story today is that the post-jobs economy is here, and growing. The sooner we fully understand that, and adjust to it, the more likely we can ensure a happy ending.