Latest news with #PassportCanada
Ottawa Citizen
24-04-2025
- Business
- Ottawa Citizen
Quebec court approves Phoenix pay system settlement
The federal government will begin settlement payments for non-unionized and casual public servants affected by the Phoenix pay system failures. Article content Article content On April 15, the Superior Court of Quebec approved the settlement of a class action lawsuit launched on behalf of the workers who suffered hardship due to pay issues with the system. The settlement will pay $350 to workers affected between 2016-17 and $175 for the preceding three years. The maximum an eligible worker can receive is $875. Article content Article content The federal government settled the class action lawsuit late last year. Article content Article content Ezmie Bouchard, who worked at Passport Canada in 2016, was the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, which was launched in 2017. Bouchard claimed that she received $4,800 less than what she should have because of mistakes on her pay cheques. The lawsuit said she was then overpaid and had to repay $1,000 to the government. Article content Unionized employees were excluded from the authorized judgment, and were subject to a separate agreement between the federal government and their unions. In 2020, Canada's largest public service union, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, reached an agreement that gave 140,000 workers $2,5000 in compensation each. Article content Nine years into the debacle, the work to clear a massive backlog of pay issues is ongoing. As of March 26, the Phoenix backlog had 349,000 transactions remaining to be processed. Article content The cost of Phoenix's failure has been ballooning. Since 2017, the government has spent at least $3.5 billion on the Phoenix pay system. Article content Article content The government has spent more than $150 million since 2018 looking into a platform to replace Phoenix. A February 2024 report found that Dayforce was being considered as a 'viable option' for the next HR and pay system. Article content Article content A decision on whether the federal government will move to Dayforce was delayed until after the election. The federal government had said it would make a decision on whether to adopt Dayforce in March, but that timeline was disrupted by the caretaker convention that is activated during an election. Article content
CBC
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Jamie Chai Yun Liew writes while she waits — at the soccer field, the passport office, wherever
Social Sharing Leading up to Canada Reads, CBC Arts is bringing you daily essays about where this year's authors write for our series Where I Write. This edition features Dandelion author Jamie Chai Yun Liew. As I am writing this piece, I am in a classroom where my son's strings ensemble is rehearsing. The music, when they are in sync, is stunning, and I find myself pausing to take in the harmony. I write in predictable places like my office, coffee shops, libraries, archives and at vacation cottages. I have written in transit, in hotel rooms, airports, on ferries, planes and trains. My laptop and notebooks come with me to beaches, ski lodges, on the sidelines of a soccer pitch, on the sidewalk waiting to get into a Passport Canada office and in hospital waiting rooms. My favourite places to write have been in kopitiams and open-air hawker markets, on the balcony of a chilli crab restaurant on stilts in the water, at a picnic table in Kapi'olani Park in Honolulu where a bird landed next to my laptop, and my mother's dining room table. My least favourite places are the air-conditioned malls in Southeast Asia, freezing without a sweater. I write wherever I find myself. I didn't always write like this and longed for a desk with a nice ambience. My research, however, takes me on the road. Even when I am home, I have a family with a busy schedule, and the opportunity to write does not always present itself when I am in an ideal location. My day job jealously covets my time at my desk and pulls me from it to teach, into meetings, and sparingly, to court. The desk is not always a creative space. Increasingly, I find myself writing where I am waiting, in between the places my family and I need to be. I like immersing my writing in places. Certain spaces — with their aesthetics, smells and temperature — find themselves into my narratives. I write with bowls of curry laksa next to me, listening to the sound of gossiping aunties, complaining uncles and the sirens of cicadas. When I was writing Dandelion, I didn't know my early reflections would become a novel. It started as a journal to creatively document how I felt about the research I was conducting about statelessness. I wanted to collect and store the emotional aspects of the stories I heard from stateless people, their families and advocates because I could not neatly fit them into my legal or academic writing. Their sentiments felt familiar and echoed what I thought was an unusual story my father told me about why he immigrated to Canada. I was grappling with questions of why statelessness is pervasive, common and largely unknown. I began to write with the hope of bringing the varied felt experiences migrants as well as stateless and racialized people endure — both the joys when risks taken work out and the grief when something lost is longed for. In Dandelion, I was attuned to the traditional Indigenous territories the story was situated in and I was sojourning in. Within the pages, I tried to pay homage to these Indigenous communities in small ways. Wherever I was writing, I revisited in my mind some favourite locales from my childhood and the places where I have found community, especially those I frequented on maternity leave. As I connected the vignettes and rewrote my drafts, I found myself wanting to steal time to jot down a thread or connection. When I was in Ottawa, I grew tired of writing in one place, agitated and restless, and would move to different establishments west on Somerset Street in Chinatown, then I would keep going as it became Wellington Street. I met friends in their writing spots in Old Ottawa South. I rotated among the local haunts that tolerated me. When I was in Southeast Asia, I succumbed to sunset views, sitting on patios and balconies, while my spouse put the kids to bed. While my children were in daycare or school there, I frequented outdoor establishments during the slow peaks of their day, sometimes slapping my ankles where mosquitos found me. I have written in the dark while my children were sleeping in the same hotel room, tucking a knitted shawl under my arms, with the light from my laptop as my only guide. I have also written while sweating, drinking a piping hot, extra sweet teh tarik in a café that only had ceiling fans, getting angry at a pen that leaked across my notebook. Writing is a lonely experience and I seek accompaniment: leaves rustling in the trees, people laughing next to me, the strange playlists in coffee shops and the shuffling of snow pants. I am grateful for the times I can steal a moment in between writing, when I like to pause and take in light passing through different windows, appreciate a good conclusion to a piece of music being played and sip my tea.
