Interview with The Honourable Stéphane Dion

MH: Once students graduate, many apply for internships in order to gain experience in their field. But we're seeing that, increasingly, these internships are unpaid, even though unpaid interns often perform the same work as employees.

Should the federal government take steps to regulate unpaid internships through the Canada Labour Code, and ensure that interns who perform the work of employees are paid for their work?

SD: Yes, I think we are at that point. As long as this practice was limited, one may see it as something that was positive – for instance, in very difficult circumstances where, say, a small employer wasn't able to pay an intern, but was still able to provide a valuable experience to them, that may have made sense.

But when it's become too systematic as a practice, then the concern is that it's a form of cheap labour. In fact, it's a form of free labour. So it begins to affect everyone – employers, employees who have lost opportunities, and young people who have no opportunity to earn a living once they are working.

And this is occuring in a context where, because of the economic downturn that we had in 2008, if you compare the number of jobs that are availabe to youth now, to before the recession, it is very low. More than 250,000 jobs have been lost and not recovered.

And so many young people are desperate when you look at this issue. So what we as Liberals think we should do is, as a first step, conduct a study to properly track unpaid work and to make it very clear that, while this is not a "usual" practice, it has become a serious and legitimate problem that we need to address.

And it's why we're asking the Conservatives to conduct a study on this issue. We insist on that, but they are ignoring the problem. And that's a real concern for us.

In the meantime, we are actively consulting everyone – young workers, employers – to see how we can make sure that we don't ban a practice that makes sense when it is carefully used, but can prohibit the type of abuse that we are seeing now.

MH: You've likely seen the recent Toronto Star article that revealed the federal government has hired 961 unpaid interns since 2008, but has only hired 22 of those interns for paid positions. Do you feel that the government is contributing to the problem of unpaid work replacing paid employment?