Good morning, everyone.
Thank you for inviting me as a witness this morning for the Canada summer jobs program.
I'm going to assume that I received an invitation to speak today based on the comments I provided to the Honourable Michelle Ferreri this past April when she contacted me to inform our township about our successful application and also our unsuccessful application.
I should note that I am the interim treasurer for the Township of Douro-Dummer. We are just east of Peterborough. It's a small township of about 7,000 people.
I have four points to make, the first one being really the most critical and the rest being probably more housekeeping items.
I think the biggest thing for us that would be a critical improvement to this program would be to have earlier decisions and to be notified earlier in the process about whether or not we have been successful.
The last few years, we have not been notified as to whether or not our application was successful until about mid-April. Since we are a small municipality, some of the summer student positions that we plan for are dependent on this funding, so this creates a significant challenge when it comes to recruitment. We already have recruitment challenges given our small application pool, and we're not going to recruit for a position that we aren't guaranteed to get funding for, so we are at a pretty big disadvantage of not being able to get the top talent and maximize the funds we're going to get from this program if we can't start recruiting until April. For example, this year we started to recruit for an office position at the beginning of April, and we didn't get one application.
I think my recommendation around this would be that if we knew by the middle or end of January whether or not we were going to be successful, that would set us up for much better success and allow us to recruit and plan going forward. It's not only about the recruitment. We have positions for running events in the township and various other things, including for parks and recreation. If we knew we were going to have those resources, versus not having them, that would allow us to plan accordingly.
The next three points, again, are less critical than the first one, but I think they're worth mentioning.
My next point is around selection criteria. I've noticed in the last few years that there's been an emphasis on diversity. I'm not disagreeing that that's important, but it just tends to put us rural townships at a disadvantage. The reality is that there's not necessarily a lot of diversity in our area, and it's hard for us to fulfill that need of the application.
Rural location is another point. We find that in addition to the small application pool, there are not a lot of people, not a lot of students, who have vehicles, and so without public transportation we have a hard time getting students who can even make it to our location. Therefore, it's even more critical that we can recruit and have every advantage possible throughout the process.
On one last note, in terms of the application process—this is a comment from my staff who complete the applications—we find that it can be a little tedious when we're submitting the application. What we find is that we go in and we start the application and then we can get timed out and we lose all progress in the actual application. This is just, again, on the administrative side of things, but it can make things take a little longer on our end and make it a little bit more tedious to actually submit the application.
Those are my opening comments. Thank you, again.