Finance committee  First of all, under employment law what matters is what the person is doing, not what they're called.

Finance committee  Secondly, “volunteer” is not defined anywhere; we don't define the term “volunteer” provincially, federally, or anywhere at all. There are some internal documents within the ministries through which they have an idea of what a volunteer means: that they're doing the work for altr

Finance committee  The data that I have is from the University of Victoria study that was conducted recently, which indicated that 72% of the unpaid interns were women. Several American studies have come to the same conclusion, as well as anecdotal evidence.

Finance committee  Absolutely.

Finance committee  It really differs province by province, but British Columbia has already taken more steps than Ontario has in terms of protecting interns and students under their workplace, health, and safety. But no, I haven't seen anything similar to OSHA in any other province, and in that res

Finance committee  Nobody.

Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  Thank you. I think you're absolutely right. I'm going to focus only on federal jurisdiction because there are rules that exist in the provinces. Federally under the Canada Labour Code there is just no clarity on whether interns should be considered employees. By default in workp

Finance committee  The Canada labour program can release interpretation guidelines that say when the word “employee” is used under that act, intern is included in that word. All that means is all of those existing employment laws that apply federally also should apply to interns. So it's releasing

Finance committee  I was referring specifically to a study done by two University of Victoria students. It was in no way a representative sample. That was the result of their study. As I said, we don't have data, but based on my experience and the job advertisements that we've looked at and the in

Finance committee  I just have one thing. Just to clarify, Minister Naqvi's bill about placing workplace health and safety laws for interns hasn't actually passed yet. It's just a proposed bill at this stage. At this point in time students in Ontario are not covered under workplace health and safet

Finance committee  So far I've only seen unpaid internships in telecommunications, so really Bell Mobility, WIND Mobile, and radio companies. I haven't seen any evidence of unpaid internships in banks or transport, so that's really the industry you should be focusing on.

Finance committee  Where I've seen them, but again we don't have any official data.

Finance committee  I think British Columbia's Employment Standards Act is the strongest example. They have interpretation guidelines that clearly explain that interns who are not working for academic credit are always entitled to minimum wage.

Finance committee  There's a company in B.C. called HootSuite, and it was found to be offside. It's a social media-based company. After it was called out it not only started paying all of its unpaid interns, it paid them retroactively for the six months prior.