I want to just return to something similar, because it's still quite unclear to me what is being done to fix this issue.
I was reading a CBC article that mentions a government call centre that's been set up in Toronto. I'm just going to quote from it:
...staffed by 100 temp-agency workers, to answer the phones from the thousands of panicked workers calling in looking for answers. These temps, who do not have security clearance, and are largely charged with reading from a script, are in place to reassure bureaucrats and provide updates on their file. They will not be able to resolve pay problems...
Then it goes on to say:
One of those scripts instructs them to tell public servants that if they informed the government of pay problems before June 1, there would be some sort of resolution by October.
It doesn't seem to line up with what we're hearing today, I guess. I'm not accusing anybody. We're hearing from people who are saying they haven't been paid in months. I've heard that from people in my riding, and I know it's being heard all across the country. You have call centres being set up just to tell people, “Well, gee, everything's going to be all right”. I would suspect that for someone who has a mortgage payment to make and doesn't have the money to do so, or who maybe can't afford to feed their kids, or whatever it might be, that little bit of reassurance from someone in a call centre isn't really going to cut it.
We've been here for an hour and a half now, and I still don't have an understanding of what is being done to fix this issue. We're hearing that people are being paid and that there's no one who hasn't gone without pay, but that's not what I'm hearing out there. Something seems to be lost in translation, I guess.
I still don't really understand what's being done to fix this issue. When you're getting thousands of calls at a call centre, it sounds to me like there must be people who still aren't being paid, and it's been months. Can we get a better sense as to what is being done to fix this, because I still don't get it?