Finance committee  Thank you. I would like to thank the chair for providing me with this opportunity to speak on such an important matter. I was first hired by the CIBC in 1974 as a teller in Hamilton, Ontario. I was there for one year before I accepted a position at Scotiabank in 1975, also as a

Finance committee  We were given a supper allowance of $5. I received no benefits, as I was classified as part-time. After several years of attempting to be reclassified as full-time, I finally went to the federal labour board, who contacted my manager, and I was subsequently made full-time. I was

Finance committee  Is that for me?

Finance committee  What is the question exactly, in a nutshell? Do you want me to tell you how that affects the employees, that they have to sell all these products to scoop all these extra service charges?

Finance committee  It's not great, because of this huge competitive thing. Everybody's trying to grab a new customer whenever they come in the door. You're forced to sell products to people. You see the same customers every day, day in and day out. How many times can you sell that one person anoth

Finance committee  Absolutely. People literally dread getting up in the morning because of the horrible things they know they're going to have to do when they get to work. They're going to have to sell somebody a mortgage they can't afford. They're going to have to let somebody buy a more expensive

Finance committee  The managers don't see a problem, because there's this big thing that goes on in the bank. It's called the annual campaign. It's a campaign where each branch, usually in the springtime, has a three-month period in which to sell the maximum number of products. It's like a competit

Finance committee  Yes, absolutely, they're all the same.

Finance committee  Absolutely, yes. I chatted with people in the other financial institutions all the time, especially after I went to the Ontario centralized accounting unit where I had to have a lot of dialogue with a lot of branches of the different banks because of the nature of the transaction

Finance committee  It was an overall culture because this campaign that I was talking about was global. It wasn't just the Canadian branches of Scotiabank; it was all of them all over the world. They all had to go through this selling campaign every year in the spring. It was an incredibly stressfu

Finance committee  That's right.

Finance committee  No teller expects, or they didn't at the time I was hired, to be a professional salesperson. They just don't expect to have to do that. It becomes kind of a culture shock. You start off as a teller doing a teller's job, and then gradually you start to become a salesperson. Then y

Finance committee  Well, it's funny, because I used to talk to my husband about that. When we went to get our mortgage, he was absolutely stunned at the amount they were willing to lend us. He asked me, “Is that right?” I said, “No. No, we cannot afford that. That's what they want us to borrow, but

Finance committee  Today it is far worse than it was back then.

Finance committee  It is far, far worse than it was back then. We have a little street festival in my hometown of Dundas. I was at the street festival on Saturday. I happened to meet an old banking colleague. She worked in the bank when I first started, in the same branch, and she still works for