Hol­i­days Cook­ies at the Byward Market

Are you guys on hol­i­days yet?

Seems like it. It’s pretty quiet these days, except in malls through­out the city where peo­ple appar­ently have a blast buy­ing the gifts Santa didn’t bring them.

Alright, let’s talk about hol­i­days then!

The other day, I was read­ing Priyank’s blog, who wrote his “9 clue I’m becom­ing Cana­dian”. He noticed the fol­low­ing in Canada:

Hol­i­days that are con­ve­niently placed on cer­tain days of week (as opposed to fixed dates) no longer sur­prise me. For e.g. Labour day is first Mon­day of Sep­tem­ber, Thanks­giv­ing is sec­ond Mon­day in Octo­ber, Fam­ily Day (ON) is third Mon­day of Feb­ru­ary, etc. I love talk­ing about look­ing for­ward to the long week­end, plan­ning trips for the long week­end, etc.

After read­ing, I paused and real­ized it was true — one of these funny lit­tle cul­tural dif­fer­ences I hadn’t noticed.

When I first came to Canada, I had been warned: there are much less hol­i­days on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, and no pub­lic strike will change labor laws. Look­ing back, I can say the sys­tem is dif­fer­ent but not in a bad way.

France has 11 Pub­lic Hol­i­days per year. With the excep­tion of those asso­ci­ated with Easter, pub­lic hol­i­days are fixed and can’t be attached to the near­est week-end. That said, if the hol­i­day is on a Thurs­day or Fri­day, many French “font le pont” (“make the bridge”) and just take the whole period off.

In Canada, the num­ber of Pub­lic Hol­i­days is a bit harder to cal­cu­late because some are fed­eral while oth­ers are provin­cial. That said, the aver­age cal­cu­lated by Stats Can is… 11 days. That’s right, the same as in France. And in Canada, like Priyank noticed, a lot of hol­i­days are placed at the end of the week so that peo­ple can have a long week-end. Oh, and if a Pub­lic Hol­i­day occurs on a day that is nor­mally not worked, then “… another day off with pay will be pro­vided.” Cool, eh?

Alright: France 1 — Canada 1.

On a side note, most pub­lic hol­i­days in France are related either to Chris­tian­ity (Easter Mon­day, Ascen­sion Day, Pen­te­cost, Whit Mon­day) or to his­tory (Bastille Day, Remem­brance Day and Vic­tory in Europe Day).

In Canada, some pub­lic hol­i­days were just pro­claimed as such and have lit­tle sig­nif­i­cance other than “yipee, I don’t work today and I still get paid”. For instance, Fam­ily Day and Civic Hol­i­day. Québec also has the funny “vacances de la con­struc­tion” (Con­struc­tion Hol­i­day) which takes place dur­ing the last two weeks of July. It applies offi­cially only to the con­struc­tion indus­try but many take their vaca­tions dur­ing these two weeks.

How about for vaca­tion? There is indeed a big dif­fer­ence between Canada and France. Labor law is com­pli­cated but most employ­ees enjoy as much as 5 weeks paid vaca­tion time a year. For some rea­son, the only time French ever con­sider to take their hol­i­days is between July 14^th and August 15^th: resorts and beaches (espe­cially in South­ern France) are packed at this time of the year and this is the worse time to travel because free­ways can be jammed for kilo­me­ters. Nonethe­less, few French even con­sider not tak­ing hol­i­days dur­ing the sum­mer and the coun­try is said to be divided between “juil­letistes” (peo­ple tak­ing hol­i­days in “juil­let”, July) and “aou­tiens” (peo­ple tak­ing hol­i­days in “août”, August).

Nearly all Cana­dian provinces require at least two weeks of paid vaca­tion time a year. When tak­ing their hol­i­days, Cana­di­ans are more flex­i­ble. Well, for a start, a lot of peo­ple want to escape win­ter and week long sunny get­away in Florida, Mex­ico or the Caribbeans are pop­u­lar from Novem­ber to March. Some do take a vaca­tion dur­ing the sum­mer, espe­cially to go camp­ing or stay at the cottage.Others just take a long week-end here and there.

Granted, two weeks a year of paid vaca­tion time isn’t much. It actu­ally scares a lot of immi­grants: going home over­seas for only two weeks isn’t very real­is­tic. The solu­tion? Unpaid vaca­tion time. Some employ­ers are quite flex­i­ble with that. It is also worth not­ing that work­days are some­what shorter and less stress­ful on this side of the Atlantic. In an office envi­ron­ment, it’s com­mon to start between 8am and 10 am and to fin­ish no later than 5pm. Work­ing over­time isn’t usu­ally praised: it can actu­ally be not well thought of because it means you are not efficient!

Alright, I let you enjoy the rest of your hol­i­days… if you have some! I’m in Toronto for a few days… before going back to work next week.

Related arti­cles:

1. Seven Things About Myself
2. Redis­cov­er­ing Canada – Things To See and Do If You Live in Canada
3. I Belong Here… And There Too
4. How to Avoid… Employ­ment Scams
5. The Office