Finance committee  Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. My remarks are focused on concerns that the Canada student service grant raises regarding potential volunteer misclassification and the exploitation of students and recent graduates. I

Finance committee  Will do. I'm sorry about that. As I was saying, the program itself is seemingly at odds with the government's own efforts to crack down on the exploitation of workers through unpaid internships, including in regard to the standards for work-integrated learning activities regulat

Finance committee  Yes, of course.

Finance committee  I am aware of those programs, and I'm aware that students were initially excluded from CERB, and that might have contributed to the rush in having to put this together.

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, I had about two minutes of statements put to me. I never had an opportunity to respond to them before you turned to another speaker. Can I have an opportunity to respond to the various assertions that were put to me?

Finance committee  Thank you. There was a suggestion that there's a difference of opinion with respect to the payment of volunteers. First, if I were allocating a $900-million program, I wouldn't want to be resting on a difference of opinion as to its legality. When we're talking about this differ

Finance committee  I think, generally, payment for work is antithetical to volunteering. When organizations give payments to volunteers or some sort of reward to volunteers, they need to be extremely careful about that. I think the scope of the debate of acceptable sorts of payments, reimbursements

Finance committee  Yes, absolutely. I think there's also concern about the displacement effect, where this may be potentially displacing paid jobs. This raises a number of concerns about its impacts on the labour market and on volunteerism.

Finance committee  Yes, I believe students should have been provided support for paid work, and, if support were going to be given to the charitable sector, a different approach should have been taken. From what I can see and from what I've heard from folks in the sector, this was not what they wer

Finance committee  I was not consulted by the government. I'm not aware of anyone who was. If I had been consulted, I would have raised these very serious concerns about the impropriety of this sort of arrangement.

Finance committee  Yes, that's another important liability piece to this. The direct agencies that are getting the work could be on the hook as employers. That could be wages over time—things like that— that they'd have to be responsible for. The government could be tied in in a number of ways. As

Finance committee  First of all, it's interesting, in that the federal government here is initiating this program, but these are workers who are under provincial employment standards. Presumably it's the provincial employment standards that would apply. The federal government can't do away with tho

Finance committee  Yes, absolutely. As you said, like you, I volunteer a lot. Just to be clear, volunteering exists. It's something that is important to our society, and I'm not suggesting that.... But like I said, there is a difference between a true volunteer and a misclassified employee. Unfor

Finance committee  Of course, and folks should volunteer, and they do. As we heard yesterday from Ms. Speevak, students volunteer at extremely high rates, but what we don't want to see is volunteer misclassification and mistreatment of workers who are being improperly classified as volunteers and b

Finance committee  I'd suggest that, for many of these positions, if they look like jobs, they should be treated as jobs.