Steve- Yes. It'll be submitted to the proper authorities. They will take action. I'll sit here then. Yeah.
Steve- Theresa, first of all, we are going ladies first, and second of all it might be that you have a more varied professional background than some of the others here, so, and that might be of interest, so presumably you trained as an accountant?
Theresa- Yes.
Steve- And could you tell us about some of how you build up your accounting business and how you moved from one business to another? I think this could be quite interesting for people.
Theresa- Yes, my original occupation was accounting, and I worked for an accounting firm, Chartered accounting firm in Toronto. And learned as an articling student there, and worked in what they called, "The Pit", or, "The Pool", where all the bookkeepers on the lower end would start off in. I ended up getting quite a varied background in different industries by working for several different companies, and which turned out to be to my advantage because no matter where I moved to and I ended up, because of different situations, moving around Canada quite a bit.
So I could go into a city and be able to pick up a job quite readily. So that turned into the next career I ended up. I decided that ?one of the places that I did some bookkeeping for was an employment agency in Toronto, and they would actually charge people to find jobs for them. Actually not charge the people, but charge the companies for finding people for them, so I started an employment agency here in Surrey.
An employment agency, what that does is basically, we maintained a database of people that would come in and we would test them on their skill levels of different-in different occupations, and then we would get, advertise to companies that we had these skilled people, and try and match them up and the companies. it would be the companies that would pay the fee. Because it is illegal to charge, actually, an employee.
Steve - Okay, let me just interrupt here. So, you moved from Toronto to Surrey, here in British Columbia. And, I beg your pardon?
Theresa- How far back do you want to go, because I was originally born in Newfoundland?
Steve- Okay. No, that's fine, no, no, but I'm just, because you mentioned Toronto and some of our foreign when you mention Surrey, some of our learners may not know where Surrey is. So I just wanted to say, so you're originally from Newfoundland. You started your professional career in Toronto, and then you moved out here and you started your own employment agency.
Theresa- Yes.
Steve- And how difficult is that? I mean, what is more difficult-finding people who are looking for jobs, finding jobs for the people who are looking for jobs. How does that business work?
Theresa- That business works- mostly it's finding the companies that? and getting the criteria from them, and finding,? the people are, there's a lot of people out there looking for work, obviously. But it's the others, matching them. The right person with the right company. So yes, you're always out there and you're trying to convince, basically, the company, that you have the right, skilled people for them. So that's the difficult side. Steve- You know, it's very interesting, I noticed in the paper today, that in France, they're having riots because the government has introduced legislation. Because in France they have very high youth unemployment - it's like 25%. And one of the problems in France is that it's so difficult to get rid of someone. And so the government decided that they would try to introduce more flexibility in hiring. And they said that a youth under the age of 26 who has not yet had a job, he can be fired within 2 years. You know more easily than is otherwise the case. And of course the government's intention is to try to help people get work. But, of course, presumably labor organizations and youth groups and so forth are now out in the streets protesting and demonstrating and so forth. But in your experience, if the employer felt that he could not, say, terminate someone, that after a year if they were not satisfied with them, do you think that would inhibit people from hiring?
Theresa- Yes, well the current laws in British Columbia are that in the first-generally, and you need to have this in writing- in the first 90 days, you are given, an employer is given 90 days to be able to terminate an employee without cause. So this is the employment laws in British Columbia are quite arduous for the employer after 90 days. Because once you're in there for 3 months, it is very difficult to let that person go with cause. And there's a lot of employment standards that are very difficult for employers. You may, the employee may start and find that, you know, after 3 months they're just going to, they know they've reached their time limit and then they just start slacking off and then it's very difficult to actually get rid of that person. And that's between a non-union shop versus a union shop. In a union shop, it is even more difficult to have someone removed from their job if they're not pulling their weight. Steve- You know I hadn't realized that? I've never had a problem with, because very often the person knows that they're not doing very well, and they're not that happy there, and, we've never really worried about it but maybe we should. I hadn't, you know, whew, I didn't realize that. It is difficult to even if yeah, ok, I didn't know that. Yeah, that was my understanding, and certainly when I checked with my controller he seemed to feel that it wasn't. Obviously we have that three month probationary period. But it's sometimes very hard to tell in three months whether the person is, and, if anything, you're inclined to want to give them a chance. So, yeah, they, you know it took them a while to learn the ropes, but let's give them another month, another month, and then, they continue to confirm that they arenot the right person for the job. And finally you say, you know, enough is enough. And-but I was not aware that we were in any way prevented from hiring people, firing people.
Theresa- Well, you, you're not prevented, but still, they, I hear a lot more cases where, yes, you give them the two weeks' notice, you let them go, but they come back on you and say, "No, you let me go without cause, you know, without just cause." And they come back and sue you. So, you know it's, we have a lawyer here now that's saying, "no way." You know, so, we'll get to that one. But anyway, yeah.
Steve- So, but, so then you, they, you were in the employment agency business for a while, but now you are in the tourism business. So how did that happen?
Theresa- Well my husband has owned a tour bus for the last 30 years, and working for other tour companies. About six or seven years ago we decided to start our own tour company because he was developing most of the tours for other tour companies, and we decided, well, let's do it for ourselves. And so, we started this and we're doing, we work mostly with seniors, so we put the tours together, we research the hotels, where to stay. We book those for people, and but some, we meet some very interesting people, mostly seniors, as I said. And we, it's a 48-passenger bus, so we come from these trips with 48 new friends. Steve- Well I can imagine that's interesting, because I, when I started my own business in lumber in order to help pay for trips that I had to make to Japan and to Europe, I volunteered to take-or I got paid for it-but I took a group of Japanese lumber people to Europe. And then I arranged all of the visits over there, and it's sort of like you know, what is it called? what was the, what's the famous, no, it's I can't remember, one of the books we learned at school where, at any rate, you meet these people for the first time. And over the course of, say, two weeks, you get to know eight people quite well, that you never knew before. And sort of have it, you know have a different day, what is it the lady from Bath, and what's that called? The book Chaucer's the Canterbury Tales. Yeah.
So, you get to know these people and so you could almost write a book on each one of them. And, and so, and its of course the first day you meet you're very kind of formal and whatever, and then you think they're a certain way, and then three days later you find out that person's actually quite different from what you thought. So, I, do you have some of the same experiences when you travel with your group?
Theresa- Yes, absolutely, and, we try and mold our group together the first day and I go around and usually have each other, each person introduce themselves, and, or else I'll get them to fill out a form and then I'll introduce them and I tell them if they don't fill out the form correctly then I'll make up stories. So we have a lot of fun with that, and that helps mold the group together for the first day and they also have to do what they call a seat rotation, so every day they sit in a different seat so they get to know the people around them.
Steve- Do you ever get any either foreign tourists, or, even people living here in Canada whose English is not so good?
Theresa- Yes, we do actually. On some of our tours we end up with people that might be in visiting. And visiting friends or something, and, more recently we've had people, quite a few Germans on the bus that didn't, their German was, their English wasn't very good. So, their relatives were translating for them. But I know I'm, with my husband, he's, he has tours from all over the world, and has a lot of German tourists on his bus as well as French.They generally though come with a tour guide that speaks English and will translate or speaks the native tongue and will translate on the bus. Steve- Of course, if they get on the Linguist, they won't need that translator anymore. That's for the future. Thank you very much Theresa, and we'll move along here, and Neil is sitting right next to me so we'll move to Neil.
