If you got a speeding or parking ticket in 2007, you can thank Coun. Matthew Shoemaker for that.
Shoemaker was in his final year of Algoma University then.
He got a summer job in the provincial offences court office at the Civic Centre, handling matters of that sort.
The following two years, when Shoemaker was studying law at the University of Ottawa, he spent his summers toiling in the city's legal department.
He appreciated being able to work his way through law school.
Now a lawyer and Ward 3 councillor, Shoemaker's fighting for students looking for scarce work opportunities in the Summer of COVID-19.
"With the declining economic fortunes across the board in Canada, it's going to be harder for everybody to find employment, including students," he told a meeting of City Council on Monday.
"They gain valuable experience from working at the city. I know. I was a former summer student."
"We are looking in great detail at what we need with summer students," responded Malcolm White, the city's chief administrative officer.
"We know we will need summer students to some degree because we do depend on them for operations and those operations will continue. We have to continue to provide them and the only way we can provide them is through the use of summer students," White said.
"That being said, we do have areas that we simply aren't offering services right now. Those would include our recreational facilities that are closed, as well as our outdoor sports fields."
"When we deal with something like outdoor sports fields, if they're not being used for sports – and right now they can't be due to provincial order – we still have to do a certain level of maintenance on them to preserve the asset. We still have to do a certain amount of spring repair and we have to maintain the grass and other things on them, essentially to the level of a passive park."
"But we don't need to do sport field lining and we don't need to cut the grass as often as you need to do on a sports field," White told Shoemaker.
"What may happen is we may get to a point, hopefully, sometime this summer, where the leagues are able to start up again and they are able to utilize those fields. Once we get to those points and see them coming, we probably will be able to hire the students that normally would have provided that level of service back."
"It's just that we will hire them at a later date and for a shorter term."
White said that, aside from sports, some students are hired for specific city events or programming.
"If we're not able to provide that because facilities are closed and programming isn't there, then it's difficult to hire the same number than you had in a previous year," the CAO said.
Shoemaker continued to push the issue.
"Can we get an assurance, maybe in the future report, maybe now verbally, that to the greatest degree possible, as many summer students as we can hire to ensure that there are those opportunities out there, will be hired this year?"
"Is there any way to maintain the complement? Is there any way that we can hire the same number back? Are all those options going to be looked at?"
"We're certainly cognizant of the importance of summer employment for summer students," White replied.
"We will endeavour to do what we can, given a whole lot of issues that we need to balance. We will be able to provide some more detail on that at upcoming council meetings."
