Hello, everyone.
My name is Claire Seaborn.
I am a common law student at the University of Ottawa. I am also the President of the Canadian Intern Association.
We're a not-for-profit federal organization that aims to improve internship experiences and end the exploitation of unpaid interns.
Over the next five minutes I will speak about the problems with unpaid internships, outline the internship issues within federal jurisdictions, and provide legal and policy recommendations.
The word “internship” isn't defined in Canadian workplaces or in law. Internships can be paid or unpaid and they can be part of a formal educational program or they can be independently organized. An estimated 300,000 unpaid internships outside of school programs take place across Canada annually.
I speak to interns about their experiences every day and I've been an unpaid intern twice myself.
Although paid internships can be extremely valuable, unpaid internships facilitate socio-economic, gender, and intergenerational inequality. There are two University of Victoria master's students who recently undertook a study of unpaid internships to examine these issues. They're here today. While this study has limitations, the results provide insight on the characteristics and outcomes of internships in Canada.
For many industries, unpaid internships have effectively become a prerequisite to a job. The result is that those without the right financial means or connections are simply unable to break into certain fields.
The University of Victoria study found that unpaid internships have a disproportionate effect on women. Industries with unpaid internships are typically female dominated. Now, older generations who did not perform internships are benefiting from the labour of younger workers.
Unpaid internships also present other problems: they drive down wages, replace paid positions and contribute to youth unemployment.
In 2013, roughly 14% of Canadians aged 15 to 24 who were looking for work could not find a job.
A study from the University of Victoria revealed that 86% of unpaid interns were not hired at the end of their internship.
Now I'd like to shift to internship issues within federal jurisdictions.
First, there is a complete lack of data on internships in Canada. No provincial or federal government has collected any statistics regarding the prevalence or characteristics of unpaid internships.
Second, federal workplace laws are unclear regarding the status of interns. The Canada labour code does not have provisions for training or for internships, and the Canada labour program has not released any interpretation guidelines. Under Canadian workplace law, interns are considered employees unless they are subject to some kind of statutory exclusion. So provinces like Ontario and Quebec and British Columbia have all released statutory exclusions or interpretation guidelines for interns and trainees. But the federal government hasn't done that.
This legal ambiguity at the federal level means that interns can't claim EI or CPP, and they can't make contributions either. They're not protected under federal workplace health and safety laws.
The third problem is that measures designed to prevent employers from offering unpaid internships are insufficient. For this reason, unpaid interns do not pay income tax. We believe that millions of dollars in tax revenue are lost in this way.
Now I have two examples to illustrate these internship issues.
The first example is Jainna Patel, who is one of over 100 unpaid interns at Bell Media in Toronto. She did telephone surveys, performed research, and wrote reports. She is actually a math and statistics major. She filed a complaint with the Canada labour program and the inspector rejected that complaint.
After we put Bell Media on our wall of shame, we received emails from a bunch of other interns who had similar experiences. One was an unpaid intern in Bell's hardware department. He provided technician support for Bell's computers. Unpaid, he implemented software and hardware for the network infrastructure as well.
Jainna has appealed her decision and a hearing is going to take place this summer to determine whether Jainna was entitled to wages and whether Bell must pay their interns.