Inaugurated four years ago and falling on the second Monday in February, B.C.’s Family Day continues to be out of sync with a growing number of provinces, as well as the U.S., which celebrate statutory holidays on the third Monday of the month instead.
While many of us don’t care, or are glad to have the day off one week earlier than everybody else on principle, there are some people in the province who can’t fully enjoy the “family” part of Family Day due to this discrepancy. That’s because they have family members residing in places like Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, or south of the 49, who can’t visit for the long weekend or even have a long talk on the phone on Family Day itself because it’s business as usual in all of those places.
As well, because it really is business as usual everywhere else, some British Columbians can’t spend Family Day with their families as they have to work when the rest of the country is open for business.
Enough people are adversely affected that a Change.org petition started last year by Vancouver financial advisor Andrew Johns, asking Premier Christy Clark to align the holiday with other jurisdictions, has collected more than 16,000 signatures to date. For these folks, it must seem like the B.C. government subscribes to comedian George Burns’ definition of happiness: “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”
For its part, the provincial government cites a public consultation process conducted in 2012 in which a clear majority favoured the second Monday in February. Today, with B.C.’s nonconformist approach exposed as an actual hardship for some families, we suspect there would be a different result.
Premier Clark deserves kudos for instituting Family Day in this province four years ago. Now it would be wise for her to listen to the calls for change and provide the maximum opportunity to the maximum number of B.C. families to actually celebrate the day as it was intended.
