The decision by the Public Service Alliance of Canada to ask its members to boycott downtown businesses is an absolute disgrace. These same businesses barely made it through the COVID pandemic while most PSAC members were getting a guaranteed paycheque every two weeks while working from home.

A number of small businesses never recovered from the pandemic and ended up having to close their doors for good. This is especially true for restaurants. They struggled to survive for the better part of two years, surviving only on takeout orders while delivery services like Skip the Dishes and Uber Eats stung them with exorbitant delivery fees. For nearly two years they hung on to the hope that their customers would come back once the pandemic was over and federal employees returned to work.

Well, the pandemic ended, the regulations and restrictions were lifted, but the federal employees only returned to work two days a week. Yes, business improved, but only marginally and not enough to enable many businesses to repay the $40,000 in CERB loans they received in order to make it through the pandemic. Most of those same businesses still haven’t paid back their CERB money. Instead, they had to convert those CERB loans to private loans from their financial institution and they’re struggling to make those monthly payments on top of all their other expenses.

Besides, I always thought unions were built on a socialist ideology. That a union’s strength is in the willingness of its members to support each other. But I guess that ideology doesn’t extend past the union. We’re is their sense of community?

A friend of mine who works for the federal government and was already upset at having to go back downtown two days a week, argued that it wasn’t their responsibility to help keep downtown businesses alive.

She’s right, of course. It isn’t her responsibility or PSAC’s, for that matter. It is, however, the right thing to do.

Federal government workers have already been boycotting those same small businesses three days a week while being allowed to work from home. Now they’re being asked to work downtown an extra day. For some small businesses, the extra revenue that might be generated during that extra day could be the difference between life and death.

Instead of boycotting those businesses, federal government workers should go out of their way to support them. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do. And don’t tell me that spending money during the day means you’ll have less money to spend at local businesses in your community because no one is going out to have lunch every other day at their local restaurant in Orléans. I know this because most of the restaurants I interact with in Orléans have yet to see any increase in business post-pandemic compared to pre-pandemic. In fact, many have yet to experience a pandemic bounce back even as federal employees are allowed to work from home.

So to heck with PSAC. Thankfully, the early reports are that many federal employees are ignoring the union’s directive and are supporting downtown businesses. God bless them and God bless the local business owners who have managed to survive both the pandemic and the loss in business since.