Finance committee  I believe it's the Canada summer jobs program that does that.

Finance committee  That's a great question, and if you do the math on this, it boggles your mind because it seems that the money is there. If you consider the testimony we heard that they were trying to create upwards of 100,000 positions, with up to 500 hours per position, if you paid those folks

Finance committee  I can't comment on that. I don't know the answer to that. All I can say is that, as I said earlier, I'm not sure why the program was structured the way it was when it seems there could have been other options, such as simply paying these workers a fair wage within the existing fu

Finance committee  Yes. I made some reference to some of the factors that some of these older cases have looked at. The Ontario policy and interpretation manual cites a few cases from before I was born. They're before the rise of unpaid internships and they're before the statutory response to unpai

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

Finance committee  I'm a citizen, so I've—

Finance committee  —so I guess I've tweeted about it. I've [Inaudible--Editor] about this point, but—

Finance committee  Well, I can—

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I've been very careful today to try not to talk about the WE portion of this, because I don't think that's what my concern is here. There are experts who have spoken about that, the participants involved in that who have spoken about the appropriateness or

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  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  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  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.