Ensuring a Future for Opticians: Labour Mobility
By Mary Field
HOW OPTICIANS HAVE WORKED TOGETHER TO ENSURE THEIR FUTURE – MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE FACTS
With issues as important as labour mobility and optician-performed refracting, it’s important to get your facts right instead of making assumptions based on misinformation. Although the Opticians Association of Canada (OAC) has reported on these issues many times, we believe it is appropriate to summarize events and actions taken in order to ensure you have credible information.
Genesis of Labour Mobility
Optician groups didn’t dream up labour mobility on a whim. However, when people are working within the borders of their own country it is reasonable to expect they should be able to work where they want to, without restriction. This was not the case for many years. This situation prevented the movement of qualified people to areas of Canada where they were needed. Many of the barriers that existed were turf-protecting rules and regulations constructed by the professions themselves.
The Canadian government recognized the problem and took measures to have the provinces agree to open internal borders to labour mobility. Provincial governments consequently instructed provincial workers’ groups to develop some method of accepting qualified workers from other jurisdictions minus barriers such as special examinations or residency conditions. Recent codicils to the Agreement on Internal Trade now mandate what has already been done voluntarily by opticians.
Why Develop a Mutual Recognition Agreement?
The Canadian regulatory bodies for professionals realized it would be a duplication of effort and an unnecessary expenditure of your registration fees to develop different methods of recognizing credentials from other provinces. So they met, attempting to agree on one method for everybody. This took many years of regular meetings but they finally accomplished what some thought was impossible.
How Does Labour Mobility Affect You?
Most Canadians live and work in the region where they were born, raised and educated. Those who move do so because of career opportunities or the transfer of a spouse or partner to another region. Prior to the MRA, a relocating optician often had to repeat his/her education and be reexamined in the new province. Faced with that huge and expensive challenge the optician/spouse would often move to the new province and abandon the profession.
It is interesting that those opticians that have moved since the MRA, unaware of previous barriers now consider it their right to work anywhere in Canada. They wouldn’t have this right without the MRA.
How Many Opticians Relocate?
Of the approximately 6,000 opticians in Canada only about 100 move each year, certainly not enough to cause impact in a market that is short of trained opticians. An OAC audit of the national employment market indicates there are more employment opportunities for opticians now than any time since the OAC began in 1989. It may surprise readers that relocation of opticians is not exclusively to one province. As opportunities shift location so do opticians.
How Does Labour Mobility Affect Your Salary?
You shouldn’t fear that labour mobility threatens your job security or your earning power. On the contrary, labour mobility enhances opportunities. Labour mobility guarantees that any Canadian optician can compete for desirable jobs in any province. Previously opticians had no options and were stuck in their province of origin. Consequently they had to accept the regional salary average. Now choices are nationwide. Labour mobility has been directly responsible.
Who Paid for the Meetings of the Regulatory Bodies?
The federal government believed it was important to have workforce groups work on an MRA. So they provided funding to defray the cost of travel and meetings by a small percentage of the total. In the case of opticians, the National Association of Canadian Optician Regulators (NACOR) applied for and received available funding. This money was available to regulators only – not to associations or any other organized opticians groups. We are told the total amount of the funding received from the feds in 1998 was about $40,000. This was enough to pay for one meeting! The cost of this common sense initiative has been considerable and is ongoing. All subsequent funding came from the regulatory boards because the cost of meeting the Federal administrative controls and paperwork did not equal the amount of the grant.
Are All Canadian Opticians Equally Trained?
If an out-of-province optician wants to be licensed in your province you want to make sure the optician has had to meet the same standards you had to meet. NACOR wondered how to ensure that standard would be met, concluding that one way was to set a standard examination that must be taken by everybody in every province that was signing the MRA. To develop an examination you need a comprehensive list of what opticians do that requires training and testing. NACOR developed a list by consulting with hundreds of Canadian opticians; reviewing ‘best practice’ competencies from other countries including the United Kingdom and finally making sure the Quebec competencies were included in the resulting National Competency document. From there, an examination was constructed to test the agreed-upon skill and knowledge.
Since 2003, all opticians who apply for licensing in all Canadian provinces except Quebec have had to pass the National Examination. Based on this fact it can be truthfully said that the training of opticians across the country meets a uniformly high standard.
WHAT IS THE OAC’S POSITION ON REFRACTING BY OPTICIANS?
Responding to urging from Canadian Opticians to ‘do something’ about the optometric practice of not releasing prescriptions, the OAC Board made a decision in 1992, that if this practice continued, the OAC would work toward optician-performed refracting. The OAC has since employed considerable amounts of its human and financial resources on this project. The answer to the question posed is, “The OAC supports optician-performed refracting – Completely!”
DOES THE OAC ENCOURAGE OPTICIANS TO TAKE REFRACTING TRAINING EVEN IF LEGISLATION HAS NOT BEEN PASSED?
Absolutely! We realize training costs you money but by investing in training now instead of waiting for others to pave the way you are investing in your future and the future of the profession. We ask those who discourage this initiative, “What are you doing to open up new opportunities for opticians?”
WORKING TOGETHER IS IMPORTANT
We’re ignoring reality if we think we can prosper alone, ignoring our colleagues outside our own borders. For opticians as a profession to prosper we must work together, ignoring distractions that lead to dissension and confusion. Opticians achieve unity by working with and through their provincial associations and regulatory bodies.
|
