Youenn Siviniant, right, and his family moved to Edmundston from France after he was recruited as a travel nurse with Canadian Health Labs. The company at the heart of the travel-nurse controversy is now the subject of a complaint over unpaid wages under New Brunswick's Employment Standards Act.
"When you work in the health sector, you have to have ethics, you have to have values, because you're helping people, people who are sick." Dr. France Desrosiers, the health authority's CEO, told the legislature's public accounts committee in June that she got "the green light" for the spending from top officials — after offering them other staffing options that would have been less expensive.
Instead he started work as a personal support worker at the Edmundston Regional Hospital at $35 an hour, eventually getting a raise to $55 an hour. "It was pretty relaxing compared to what I experienced in France," he said, where he often dealt with twice as many patients on a normal shift. But in mid-June a health authority supervisor told him CHL's contract for personal support workers had ended, and he was no longer to work at the hospital.
Vitalité vice-president Frédéric Finn said in a statement that asking CHL to waive that clause, which the contract allows, "is a possibility we are exploring" and something it has done with other companies.