(Ottawa) The agents responsible for receiving calls from employment insurance claimants who had seen their work week cut short for “budgetary reasons” will soon be back in full-time positions.
The Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, Karina Gould, called for the cancellation of this measure, which reduced the number of working hours per week from 37.5 to 30 for 750 people in Quebec.
“When I found out, I did a little research, and what I can tell people today is that we’re going to make sure to give back the hours to the employees, because I don’t I wasn’t happy with the decision,” she said in an interview on Thursday.
Two weeks ago, for “budgetary” reasons, Service Canada managers cut employees’ work week by one day1 responsible for answering calls from employment insurance claimants during peak periods.
The new part-time schedules were to be in effect until the end of March.
Minister Gould did not provide a date to return to a full-time schedule, but “it will be in the very near future,” she said. She did not want to throw stones at the managers who made the decision, which was denounced by the Bloc Québécois and the Conseil national des chômeurs et des chômeuses.
Their reasons were ‘correct’, ‘not necessarily because the decision was wrong’, but ‘I tried to find another way to resolve the situation’, because ‘it’s important to me that everyone these employees work full time,” she said.
The minister did not say how much this about-face would cost, or where she had found the money to do it.
“It was necessary to find the money, and we found it,” she said, recalling that in last fall’s budget update, the Trudeau government proposed a payment $1 billion to Service Canada.
This clarification comes as a threat of a federal public service strike looms. If there were to be a walkout, the agreement of support and confidence concluded last year between the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party (NDP) could be in jeopardy.