by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

For many, the upcoming summer vacations will be a leisure-time return to fun, sun and carefree footloose frolics. However, a poll sponsored by a travel agency states the depressingly obvious: Canadian workers get less vacation time than much of the civilized world.

According to the Expedia.ca survey, conducted by Ipsos Reid in Canada, the French receive an average of 39 vacation days a year, Germans 27, the Dutch 25 and the British 23, while Canadians get an average of 21 days off. In the United States, workers get a mere 12 vacation days per year.

One psychologist who specializes in the dangers of stress warns of the perils of vacation deprivation. "When we talk about stress management, we consider three basic things: exercise, good eating and time off. Time off means not taking your work home, getting away from the work on the weekends, not checking e-mail or making calls," says Marie-Claude Lamarche, a Montreal-based psychologist and consultant. "If you don't get away from work, you'll decrease your productivity and when you get away for a significant amount of time, you come back feeling better about yourself and feeling refreshed."

According to the study, which interviewed 1,274 Canadians among over 10,000 workers in six countries, 42 per cent of us opt for two-week trips on our vacation time.

That, according to Lamarche, is the healthiest approach to vacationing. "When you go away, you're leaving everything behind and making it easier to cut off. If you stay at home you have all the problems that are under your nose."

It's not always low-income wage slaves who keep their noses to the unhealthy grindstone. "I've been practicing 15 years and I've seen it has no regard to economic condition. Some will do anything for their job and I think it has to do with insecurity," she says.

Union organizer Arthur Sanborn of the CSN contends that the issue beckons workers to the union movement. "We're cheap here in Quebec on people's vacations and I think it's a real scandal. It's one of the first things we negotiate when we represent new workers, we go for a third and fourth week, but 60 per cent of Quebec workers aren't unionized."

"There's legislation now in France that intends to bring it to six weeks of vacation," he says, "not just in the union sector but for everyone, whereas in Quebec we only have two weeks. The only other place in the developed world like that is the U.S."

"When we were kids, we were told that the tech revolution was going to let us spend half of our years on the seashore," adds Sanborn. "Teachers used to say that in schools all over North America. And the bottom line is that it'd be technically possible to have six or eight weeks [off] a year, and doing so would get work to people on employment insurance. If they do it in France, they could do it here."