When grad students James Attfield and Isabelle Couture wanted to study unpaid interns in Canada, they turned to government.

They quickly learned no federal or provincial agency tracks interns. Statistics Canada does not keep data on interns and neither does Human Resources and Skills Development Canada. In Ontario, the category simply doesn’t exist.

Couture and Attfield, both 28, designed a survey, in conjunction with the Canadian Intern Association, to find out who is doing internships, paid or unpaid, something they say government should know.

“Frankly, the fact that two students researchers are the ones tackling the data collection for this issue — something far better suited to our official statistics agency — is embarrassing and deserves public attention,” Couture said. She and Attfield are working toward a Master of Public Administration from the University of Victoria but are based in Ottawa.

“We knew there was a knowledge gap and after some research realized there were no real statistics that had been collected on interns in Canada other than some estimates as to their number.”

Those estimates vary, but some suggest there could be up to 300,000 unpaid interns in Ontario alone, including 100,000 who are not on the books and not always protected by workplace safety laws.

“There is no such thing, in law, as an unpaid internship,” said provincial Labour Minister Yasir Naqvi in an interview this week.

Naqvi pointed out that all workers are entitled to coverage under the Employment Standards Act, regardless of whether they are designated an intern. But under the law, a blanket exemption is made for students working free under the auspices of a school program.

The labour ministry encourages young workers who feel their rights are not being respected to file a complaint.

But there is no way of knowing how many have filed those complaints because the department does not record them by job title, including intern.

Another gap in the law leaves unpaid workers without protection from the Occupational Health and Safety Act, Ontario’s “cornerstone legislation” for workplace safety.

Ontario labour laws need to be modernized, starting with including interns and young workers under workplace safety laws, said Monte McNaughton, Progressive Conservative labour critic and MPP for Lambton-Kent-Middlesex.

Policy analysis is already underway at the ministry level and McNaughton said he would bring up the laws with the minister as soon as the legislature resumes next week. The NDP have called for a similar review.

“I will have a meeting one-on-one first, but I have no issues at all raising this in the legislature going forward,” McNaughton said. “Clearly this needs to be addressed sooner than later.”

“This is a growing phenomenon, where there are many interns out there and students as young as high school doing co-op placements.”

Co-op, internship and work placement are used interchangeably, with few official definitions available.

The exemption in the Employment Standards Act that permits students enrolled in high school, college or university to work for a course credit instead of a paycheque should remain in existence, but needs to be reviewed and updated as well, McNaughton said. The exemption has been in place since 1975 but over the last decade the use of internships has grown wildly.

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A confidential briefing note obtained by the Star this week revealed not only the workplace safety gap in Ontario law, but also that the ministry believes many internships may be illegal.

If not performing work for a school credit, the internship must meet six strict criteria, including the provision that the work cannot benefit an employer in any way and must be solely for the benefit of the intern.

Adam Chase did one unpaid internship through Humber College when he was an accounting student there last year. Later, he took on a second one — not for course credit — briefly. He wore a suit, headed downtown three days a week and worked on the accounts payable for a real estate company.

Then he realized he should have been getting paid for doing a company’s work. He lasted less than a month.

“I just stopped going,” Chase said. He sees numerous unpaid internships posted on jobseeker websites, but doesn’t apply. He was, he said, shocked to learn many of those might be illegal.

When it comes to interns enrolled in schools, the responsibilities of the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities and the Ministry of Labour overlap.

“There isn’t a centralized records program right now,” said Toronto labour lawyer Andrew Langille.

“If you go to the ministry of training and universities, they cannot tell you where students are working this semester. That’s a gap. We don’t know how many of these programs are in existence right now.”

That ministry also does not keep track of how many interns are working at any given time through a school program.

Attfield and Couture expect to publish the findings of their survey next year, along with an Ontario-focused policy paper.