You shouldn’t hire me to care for your sick mother. But you could. I am a certified personal support worker, and you have no idea how grossly unqualified I am.
While students enrolled at registered schools in this field will spend a year learning to empty catheters, insert suppositories and manoeuvre mechanical lifts, in a matter of weeks at a private career college in North York I learned how to fake a resume, fabricate professional references and lie my way through a job interview.
For $480 and a few hours spent watching instructional DVDs, I became eligible to work with society’s most vulnerable in hospitals, nursing lodges, community care centres and private homes.
After I aced my first job interview, a respected health-care agency in Yorkville, S.R.T. Med-Staff, tentatively offered to place me in a government-funded community care program until it checked my bogus references.
“That you could get a certificate in two weeks with virtually no experience … that’s very concerning,” said Lynn Tughan, the agency’s vice-president of operations, when I called to tell her my true identity.
Ontario’s ombudsman, André Marin, recently criticized the province for failing to shut down rogue private career colleges. He warned that potentially thousands of these schools exist, churning out incompetent graduates in an environment where employers often trust a college is a college.
I witnessed the province’s soft-handed approach last month when a provincial inspector walked into the Ontario Academy of Science & Technology while I was undercover, posing as a student. The inspector told the school’s operator, Ken Miller, that he had 15 days to comply with ministry standards.
“This is an illegal school and it is my job to let you know,” she told me. “I’m going to see if I can assist the school in becoming registered. It’s not an easy process.”
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Andre is correct. This stuff must stop and “McShifty” is responsible.
“So” — let’s end it.
This story is very scary, especially for those of us who employ care-givers 24/7.
How can anyone run a so called school like this, that could be putting the disabled in severe danger. Same goes for those operating phony driving schools and putting very dangerous drivers behind 18 wheelers.
Gee,I wonder if this Ken Miller is another one of those hard working Imported Nigerians that ran a similar school scam in Hamilton a few years ago.
O.K., it’s also time to really and I mean really take a look at this Miller character starting the day he set foot in Canada. Document verification (if he ever produced any) background checks, the entire works. I’d love to get a crack at this guy. People like him don’t just show up on Canada’s door step as pure as the driven snow, get virtually handed the world on a silver platter by our immigration system and then suddenly develop all of these criminal ‘job skills’. He brought them with him. We had a term for ’certain’ people in immigration criminal enforcement (not to be confused with the federal civil servant unwitting enablers at Citizenship & Immigration) about how can you tell when they are lying……their lips are moving.
Seems fake diplomas are not the only thing being sold. Fake passports are also being sold to future Canadians of convenience. So, was that lady that is suing us for millions really a Canadian. CBC has stories of a guy that keeps an apt in Montreal, has a telephone and pays taxes, but lives somewhere else. Another man tells how passports are being issued in case they are needed in the future.
We need a majority government so a real investigation of all govt agencies can be cleaned out.