GSB# 2005-0024, 2005-0025, 2005-0026

UNION# 2005-0232-0003, 2005-0232-0001, 2005-0232-0002

IN THE MATTER OF AN ARBITRATION

Under

THE CROWN EMPLOYEES COLLECTIVE BARGAINING ACT

Before

THE GRIEVANCE SETTLEMENT BOARD

BETWEEN

Ontario Public Service Employees Union (Carroll)

Union

• and -

The Crown in Right of Ontario (Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs)

Employer

BEFORE

Richard L. Jackson

Vice-Chair

FOR THE UNION

Stacey Zafiriadis Grievance Officer Ontario Public Service Employees Union

FOR THE EMPLOYER

Michelle Dobranowski Counsel Ministry of Government Services

HEARING

March 6, 2007.

Decision

This is the case of Marie Carroll, which arises out of a dispute between Ms. Carroll and the Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Services in regard to the proper interpretation of a Memorandum of Settlement, dated September 28, 2005, resolving several of Ms. Carroll’s grievances. The settling of these grievances was achieved in negotiations by the parties with assistance from me as mediator/arbitrator. As part of the Memorandum of Settlement, I remained seised with jurisdiction to resolve any dispute arising over the implementation of the terms of the settlement. Such a dispute has arisen and, hence, the necessity for this award.

The parties’ disagreement turns on the proper interpretation of one provision in their agreement, which is set out, in part, below.

The Employer agrees to reimburse the Grievor, on production of receipts that are submitted by March 1, 2007, up to a maximum of ______ for career transition support.

(The actual amount has been omitted, and I have strictly limited any reference to other elements of the agreement in order to respect the agreement’s confidentiality provision.)

Ms. Carroll spent the money on furniture – specifically, a couch and a loveseat. The Ministry argues that an expenditure of this nature is beyond the scope of the meaning of the phrase “career transition support”. The Union argued that it is not.

Prior to the September 2005 mediation, Ms. Carroll had decided to retire early from the Ontario Public Service at the end of November; her last actual day of work turned out to be October 6. She and her husband have been active members of their Christian Fellowship since the mid-1970s and, from the early 1990s through 2001, Ms. Carroll provided personal counselling and mentoring, on a volunteer basis, to other members of the Christian Fellowship. Upon her retirement, she and her husband gutted, renovated, and refurnished one room in their house (the room that she had used for counselling up to 2001 and which had not been renovated in 20 years) to be used for purposes of restarting her counselling. The sum of money provided for purposes of career transition in the Memorandum of Settlement was used to purchase a couch and a love seat for this room. Ms. Carroll testified that, given the often intimate nature of the counselling she provided, as well as the age of the room, she felt that it needed reconfiguring and reappointing before she resumed her counselling and mentoring. Thus far, she testified, she had been counselling/mentoring two to six hours per week, but she and her husband were hoping to expand the range of services offered. It should be noted that the Christian Fellowship to which Ms. Carroll and her husband belong does not have its own building, its operations being carried out in rented facilities and in its members’ own homes.

Counsel for the Ministry argued that an expenditure of this nature was beyond the scope of that contemplated by the parties, as reflected in the phrase “career transition” modifying the noun “support”. In short, there is simply no connection between couches and “career transition”, within any reasonable interpretation of that term. While she conceded that the parties at mediation had agreed that “career transition” should be given a broad interpretation, spending the money on furniture was too broad. If the parties had intended that the career transition support should cover the renovation of a room, surely the language would have made that clear. Counsel for the Ministry also pointed out that the room was used for counselling purposes from two to six hours per week, but was used by Ms. Carroll and her family for relaxation purposes at other times, casting further doubt on the legitimacy of characterizing the furniture purchase as “career transition”.

Spokesman for the Union urged me to take a broader view of the phrase “career transition”, recognizing that this – that is, part-time personal counselling and mentoring of church members on behalf of the church – was what Ms. Carroll’s career transitioned into upon her retirement from the Ontario Public Service.

Decision

I would agree with the Ministry’s position, were this to be a situation of an employee leaving one paid job, intending to go to another paid job, either inside or outside the Ontario Public Service. But – and this is absolutely crucial in this situation – Ms. Carroll was not going to another job; she was retiring. In retiring from the Ontario Public Service after 25 years of service, Ms. Carroll was, in effect, making the transition from the second to the third phase of life (school, work, retirement), was leaving behind her public-service career and moving into whatever retirement might bring. The scope for legitimate activity in this third phase is, and must be, much broader than were she simply moving from one paid position to another in the second (i.e., work) phase of life.

Ms. Carroll has long been a devout and active member of her church, has long practised personal and marriage counselling and mentoring. It seems entirely logical and appropriate to me that, freed of the obligations and burdens imposed by a job and career, she would put her mind and efforts to her other vocation, and take some steps to resume her counselling activities and make them a larger part of her life. Indeed, taking on volunteer work is a common step for retirees; it fits Ms. Carroll even more perfectly, given her background in counselling and in the church. It should be noted that, in this regard, Ms. Carroll testified that a desire to participate more in church work was one factor in her decision to take early retirement. As spokesman for the Union suggested, is doing volunteer work for her church any less worthy a way to spend one’s time than working for the Ontario Public Service? In the context of retirement, is it any less a “career”? With the greatest of respect, it was up to Ms. Carroll, and not to the Ministry, to decide what her new career would be.

“Career-transition” is intrinsically a very general concept at any time but particularly so in the context of the retirement of a long-serving employee. Webster’s New College Dictionary defines “career” as, inter alia,

a profession for which one trains and which is undertaken as a permanent calling.

The use of the term “calling” here is interesting and, bearing in mind the context of Ms. Carroll’s retiring, fits reasonably well with the facts of this situation: (1) Ms. Carroll is a long-standing member of her Christian Fellowship; (2) she counselled and mentored for nine years before the 2001-2005 hiatus; (3) her intention to resume her counselling/ mentoring was one factor in her decision to retire from the public service; (4) in the time since retirement she did in fact resume her counselling and mentoring; and (5) she hoped and planned to expand it. In other words, she has exchanged her career as a full-time public servant for the provincial government for a career as a part-time counsellor and mentor for her church.

Counsel for the Ministry argued that, had the parties contemplated such a use for the career-transition component of the mediated agreement, they would have said that. With respect, I would turn this argument around: knowing that the grievor was retiring from the public service after 25 years, had the parties intended to limit the scope of expenditures to the more conventional areas of further education, career counselling, and so on, they would have made that clear.

For all of the foregoing reasons, then, I find that Ms. Carroll’s using the sum of money allocated in the parties’ Memorandum of Settlement to buy a couch and a love seat in order to assist in the refitting of a room in her house to be used for the personal counselling and mentoring of members of her Christian Fellowship is a reasonable and appropriate interpretation of “career transition support”, taken in the context of the entire Memorandum of Settlement.

Dated at Toronto, this 28^th^ day of May, 2007.