Human Resources Committee on April 6th, 2017

[Melodie Ballard]

Sure. I fell into welding by accident; I actually tried to be a carpenter. I moved to Wolfe Island and I met the president of MetalCraft Marine on the island. Hitchhiking is really popular on the island, and he picked me up one day and we started chatting and he encouraged me to apply for a job there. He said that they really like to hire carpenters; carpenters have to be exact within one-sixteenth of an inch whereas metal workers tend to be within one-quarter of an inch. With boat building, you have to be within one-sixteenth of an inch, so they like to hire carpenters and then teach them how to work with metal.

[Stéphane Lauzon, Liberal, Argenteuil—La Petite-Nation, QC]

Wrong.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Stéphane Lauzon, Liberal, Argenteuil—La Petite-Nation, QC]

Sorry about that.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

I'm sorry. Continue. We'll let them debate later.

[Melodie Ballard]

This was his take on it.

He encouraged me to apply, and I did. He said they'd be very interested in training me, which they did.

I started out as a marine outfitter. They paid me $14 an hour, and I got annual cost-of-living raise. They raised the pay once a year for everybody—I think it was 43¢ the first year. Then they asked if anybody wanted to be trained as a welder. I love collecting skills, so I always put up my hand when they ask those questions.

They took me over to welding, and I think at that point I was making $15.43 an hour. When my training was complete, I was scheduled—

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

How long was the training? How long did it take for you to start?

[Melodie Ballard]

It was three months. Actually, I had been welding boats for only three days when I found out I was pregnant. I was scheduled to get my raise to $17 an hour, which is actually the minimum for welders in the company.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Was the course just three months?

[Melodie Ballard]

Yes. It was with the company.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Okay.

[Melodie Ballard]

I had been scheduled to receive a raise and then move up to boats, but I got pregnant, so I never saw that. Obviously, that wasn't reflected in my maternity benefits, because I hadn't put in enough time.

Did I answer your question fully?

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

As I said, I want to get a feel for the overall support among witnesses for a bill like Bill C-243. Can you elaborate a bit on how this bill would change things for potential new females entering the workforce and looking at opportunities in trades like electrical, welding, or what have you?

Again, I'll just reference my friend. She is from Saint John. She is a welding inspector now, but she came up through the trade and often lamented that she was the only female there. She is still talking about barriers and stuff.

But let's go back to how Bill C-243 would change the game.

[Melodie Ballard]

It would offer more stability. For me, it's a blue-collar job and it doesn't pya that much money—not to begin with, anyway. Eventually, as you progress through the career, you can make very good money welding, but I was just at the beginning of it.

If I had that stability. If I had a stable home and if I hadn't gone through the emotional duress, I would be back to work right now. My employer would be retaining the investment they had put in me, and I would be able to return to work as somebody who is already trained in it, somebody who has already earned some raises in the company. Right now I'm going to have to start at the bottom again, with a new job, when the time comes.

It's about stability. It's making sure that your housing situation is stable so that you can go back. It's about retaining investment—my investment in the company and their investment in me—which I wasn't able to do.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Thank you for that. Again, your story is very compelling.

Ms. Vasseur, my riding is Saint John—Rothesay. It's a very industrial riding. Obviously, it's home to the Irving refinery. There's lots of work with IBEW and JDI. The head office of Saint John Shipbuilding was in my riding.

Do you think there is enough being done by employers in offering programs and incentives to attract more females to the trade? I know there's certainly some work being done in my riding with Saint John Shipbuilding and a few other ones that were referenced here. Can you elaborate on whether enough is being done and what can be done to potentially attract more females?

[Liette Vasseur]

I think it depends. The larger corporations.... You talked about Irving. Yes, we are very familiar with their program. I'm very familiar with what they are doing. That helps a lot.

The problem is that we have few large corporations that can do that, versus the small and medium-sized enterprises, which do not necessarily have the same capacity. This is why the Canada job fund agreement programs can help and facilitate this, but if and only if they can support, in some way, the flexibility of women getting a trade job and being protected.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

That's time.

Now we move over to MP Poilievre, please, for five minutes.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Thank you very much.

The employment insurance system is so big and complex that these idiosyncrasies often find their way into the system, even if they weren't designed to be there.

I remember when I was knocking on doors in the community of Osgoode, a soldier told me that his wife had a child three days before he went to serve Canada in the Middle East, in the Golan Heights. He was there for a year. He came back and applied for his parental benefits, but they said, “You can't take them, because you have to take parental leave during the first year.” He said, “I was soldiering abroad for the country in that year. Surely there must be an exception.” They said, “There is only one exception, and that is if you were, otherwise, imprisoned in a federal penitentiary, in which case you could have deferred your benefits, but not if you're protecting the country in uniform.” Anyway, we managed to fix that with the Fairness for Military Families Act.

You have identified another problem, probably one that wasn't designed to be there but just happened to be. Are there other hidden gems such as this in the system that we should know about right now while we're at it?

[Melodie Ballard]

Do you mean specifically with the EI program?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

That's right, particularly for parental and maternal benefits.

[Melodie Ballard]

One of the most striking things I experienced through this is that I didn't actually interact with a person when I filed for my benefits. Nobody sat down with me and said, “Let's look at your unique situation. Have you considered this option or that option? If you take this road, the gap with no income is going to happen.”

Once I started my file, it was as though the clock was ticking on my 50 weeks. I didn't find out until the sick leave was about to end; I had a few weeks' notice that I was about to have no income.

Then there was a mistake at the end of my file, at the extension, about when they thought that was going to end. So my income ended abruptly then, as well.

In my unique situation, I personally would have benefited greatly had somebody sat down with me and gone through the situation and helped me make a plan for how to navigate this, and told me what my choices were. There's a federal program, but I'm also a resident of Ontario. Then there are my provincial rights. I needed somebody to help me reconcile the two, because they don't always reconcile. Even though I switched to the OW program and wasn't accessing EI, my province was still protecting my right to return to work.

I think having an intake person make sure that somebody understands all their rights and all their options ahead of time is one of the biggest things we could design into the program, especially for unique situations.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

I guess the challenge with that one, even in cases where the system is unfair, is that public servants don't have the power to change the rules. Sometimes those problems are just right in the law. They'd be breaking the law if they did otherwise.

Second, the more front-line casework the department does, the higher the cost, because the caseworkers have to be paid. That can only be covered through higher premiums for workers or lower benefits for recipients. Where do we get the money to pay for that?

[Melodie Ballard]

I don't know. I don't work with money.

Another idea could be having a website designed where people would input their unique situations and suggestions would be output for a path to take. Maybe that's just a one-off cost and then people could interact with it on their own. I don't design big programs.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Are you still working in welding?