The Northern Ontario city is planning three referendum questions on shopping hours to be put before voters during the 2014 municipal election. Wording of the three questions before city council is still up in the air. They ask whether the council should regulate hours, whether stores should open on Boxing Day and whether they should open on the August Civic Holiday.
The diocese of Sault Ste. Marie won’t take a position on the referendum, but Bishop Jean-Louis Plouffe personally doesn’t see a need for extended shopping hours.
“What we have now really responds to the needs of our people,” Plouffe told The Catholic Register. “I really don’t see any benefits for the community as such. I don’t think there is any real need to extend shopping hours.”
The fight is not about Sunday shopping, which is already legal. Sudbury’s downtown Rainbow Centre shopping mall is open Sundays 1 a.m. to 5 p.m. as is the suburban New Sudbury Centre.
If there’s anything people need more of, it’s time with their families, said the bishop.
“Many people really can no longer enjoy as much time as they used to for family life,” Plouffe said. “Extending these hours will make it more and more difficult for people to live up to their responsibilities.”
Plouffe expects labour unions to oppose extending hours because it expands temporary and part-time employment with no benefits, which eventually drives down wages. While some members of the business community favour deregulation, Plouffe notes that not all members of the business community are lining up behind the campaign to extend shopping hours.
Sudbury and District Labour Council president John Closs told The Sudbury Star the referendum question has been worded to favour a yes vote.
“The vague and unbalanced question does not adequately inform the voters of the implications of the choice that they will make,” he said. “In reality, the voters are being asked to allow all stores in Sudbury to open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.”
Chamber of Commerce policy and communication manager Johathan Laderoute casts the issue as a matter of free choice.
“If there is money to be made, then they will open. If there isn’t, then they won’t open,” he told The Sudbury Star.
Church teaching does not concern itself with the specific question of when the mall should be open. The Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church both have a great deal to say about which priorities should hold in economics. The catechism reads:
2423: The Church’s social teaching proposes principles for reflection; it provides criteria for judgment; it gives guidelines for action:
Any system in which social relationships are determined entirely by economic factors is contrary to the nature of the human person and his acts.
2424: A theory that makes profit the exclusive norm and ultimate end of economic activity is morally unacceptable. The disordered desire for money cannot but produce perverse effects. It is one of the causes of the many conflicts which disturb the social order. A system that “subordinates the basic rights of individuals and of groups to the collective organization of production” is contrary to human dignity. Every practice that reduces persons to nothing more than a means of profit enslaves man, leads to idolizing money, and contributes to the spread of atheism. “You cannot serve God and mammon.”