Finance Committee on March 27th, 2014

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you, Mr. Van Kesteren.

We'll go to Mr. Adler, please.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you all for being here today.

I want to clarify one thing, Ms. Seaborn. What is the difference between a volunteer, an intern, an employee, and a co-op student?

[Claire Seaborn]

First of all, under employment law what matters is what the person is doing, not what they're called.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Okay.

[Claire Seaborn]

Secondly, “volunteer” is not defined anywhere; we don't define the term “volunteer” provincially, federally, or anywhere at all. There are some internal documents within the ministries through which they have an idea of what a volunteer means: that they're doing the work for altruistic purposes; that it's not to advance their own career.

But you're absolutely right that the line is murky between the idea of an intern and an employee, in some cases, whereas the terms student or co-op are defined, in large part. But an internship can be a co-op; a student can do an internship. Many of these definitions overlap. You can have a paid internship, in which case the intern is an employee.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Right. Thanks.

We've been talking so much about the traditional kinds of jobs. Ms. Robinson, you acknowledged this earlier when you said that it's more the muscle jobs that we're focusing on here, on getting the training for those kinds of historical and traditional jobs that we've all become accustomed to, particularly in Ontario.

But what about the real quality of a country being defined through...? Yes, we need the people who are going to work in manufacturing, but we also need poets and musicians and people who are artists and all of that. Where do all those sorts of people, who want to train in those professions or who have talents and want to expand those talents, fit into this entire picture?

Anybody, just jump in. I don't necessarily mean Ms. Robinson, but anybody.

[Robert Annan]

I'll just quickly say that certainly at Mitacs we do a lot of work with, as you might expect, things like engineering and so on, but in fact about a quarter of our internships now are done with students from the social sciences and humanities, and oftentimes those skills are very transferable. You may have a psychologist doing work with a video game company, a historian doing work with a first nations group. You have different ways of applying those skills and it often is the case of learning the transferable or so-called professional skills to layer on top of the academic training.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Okay.

[Nobina Robinson]

I guess I would just say that being a poet...this is the privilege of this kind of society, you can actually pursue that in Canada, and you can go to very fine universities to do that. If you want to be doing applied arts in, for example, Sheridan, in the ceramic arts, you can also do that. The issue is the application to the end profession and occupation.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

But you hear stories of people who typically want to be an actor starting off as a waiter or waitress and they do that until they get their break, so you can consider that person to be desperately underemployed too.

In first year at U of T in sociology we had to read The Vertical Mosaic by Porter, which talked about social stratification in Canada. Ms. Bollo-Kamara, do you believe that exists in Canada—that we're defined by our social class and it's hard to bust out of that?

[Yolen Bollo-Kamara]

Yes, absolutely; our education is becoming more and more unaffordable for students, which means that a lot of people either can't afford to go to university, or if they are able to, aren't able to have the same opportunities as other students, for example, being able to take on unpaid internships. So that does work to further stratify.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

What would be your solution then? We're here looking for solutions to youth unemployment, youth underemployment, chronic youth unemployment. What would you offer as a solution?

[Yolen Bollo-Kamara]

With respect to unpaid internships specifically?

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Not necessarily, just a solution to the youth unemployment dilemma that we face along with every other country in the OECD.

[Yolen Bollo-Kamara]

It's a big question.

One of the things that I talked about as one of my recommendations was actually gathering the data so we can figure out where we should be most concerned and how to address that.

Unpaid internships, I think, are a really big issue. The problem in Ontario, but also nationally, is that these aren't proactively being investigated. Ontario's legislation around unpaid internships isn't terrible, but the fact is a lot of students don't know what their rights are. We'd like to see the federal government work with the provincial governments to make sure that they are actually going out and looking at the prevalence of unpaid internships and actually doing something to address that.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Adler.

We'll go to Mr. Cash, please, again.

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

First of all, it's a revelation and it's an encouraging sign to hear my friends on the other side are interested in fact-based and empirical research and data, and the development of poets.

I want to just ask the question again about how we got to this point where we're hearing about so many unpaid internships. We're not talking about just in the media space, we're talking about busboys and bus women. How did we get here? What are some of the reasons? What are some of the factors that got us to this point?

Ms. Seaborn, do you want to take that one?

[Claire Seaborn]

We've had internships in Canada for at least 100 years, in the medical field for example, but I think the time when we started to see the prevalence of unpaid internships was around the 2008 financial crisis. This is something that built in the United States and now has been growing in Canada and it was exacerbated by the lack of awareness about the laws that do exist.

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

Speaking of the laws that do exist, when you look at the labour program, the federal document states:

[c.] Training initiated on the volition of the employee or developmental voluntary training which prepares the employee for another job does not constitute hours of work.

Other than those issues, other than that very narrow definition, the rest is work.

[Claire Seaborn]

If my memory serves me well, that guideline was adopted in 1992, so well before the internship issue came up, and now we're applying it to this internship issue, which is great because it does give a presumption that interns should be paid but it in no way covers all of the breadth of internship issues that have arisen since that time.

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

Then it sounds therefore like we could amend these rules very quickly and very simply. Do you agree with that?

[Claire Seaborn]

Absolutely.

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

And then once that happens, we need to engage in some kind of an educational endeavour, I assume, to ensure that companies understand what the rules are. And I just want to ask again about the enforcement of rules. We've got something right here that also could be enforced at the federal level, no?

[Claire Seaborn]

Yes, absolutely, but I think there's a lack of investigative officers dealing with this issue and also those officers don't have knowledge of things like that guideline or ways that the word “employee” can be interpreted. The perfect example of that is Jainna Patel's case, and I think we will see more clarity this summer after her hearing is heard against Bell Mobility. We're going to have a referee hearing where that adjudicator will determine whether Bell was required to pay its interns.