Some security guards in Manitoba are temporarily losing their jobs due to a licence renewal process bogged down by inadequate staffing and a spike in applications, the head of their union says.
Since they cannot legally work without an active licence, the security guards have to stop working while they wait for the renewal.
And once they finally do get their licence renewed, they’ve sometimes been replaced at their former worksite, says United Food and Commercial Workers Local 832 president Jeff Traeger.
“By the time they’ve been off work for a month and a different guard has been posted to that site, most of those clients will not want to change” their security staffing, he said.
“What we’re finding with a lot of those guards, they get their licence back … they go back into the regular queue and they get regular, lower-paying security jobs.”
Well over 100 security guards have lost work because their licences expired within the last year, Traeger said, in spite of applying for renewals in what they thought would be plenty of time to prevent a disruption in their work — in some cases, months ahead of their expiry.
“They’re not happy,” said Traeger, whose union represents more than 2,500 security guards in Manitoba.
“They feel as though it’s a red-tape scenario that’s preventing them from doing their job.”
The province didn’t answer a question from CBC about how many licences have expired while waiting for renewal.
Office staff doubled: province
The province’s justice minister says shortly after the NDP took office last fall, he was getting letters from security guards saying they were waiting more than three months for a renewal.
The average time for a licence renewal has now dropped to around eight weeks, but the department is aiming to cut the wait to four weeks, Matt Wiebe said.
“We heard that frustration,” he said, while blaming the previous Progressive Conservative government with failing to act.
“We were frustrated this had been left to this point that ultimately, people weren’t getting their applications renewed.”
His department beefed up staffing at the Private Investigators and Security Guards Program, which handles annual licence renewals, shortly after last October’s election, Wiebe said.
Six people now work in the unit full-time. In recent years, the program has had as few as two or three full-time employees, the province said.
The licence office is now tackling renewals based on expiry date rather than processing all applications on a first-come, first-served basis.
That’s reduced the number of expirations, Traeger said, but it hasn’t fully eliminated them.
Progressive Conservative justice critic Wayne Balcaen urged the NDP to immediately prioritize solving the issue.
Restoring $9 million cut to various areas of the justice department in the latest budget would go a long way toward clearing the backlog, he said in an emailed statement.
The Tory statement didn’t acknowledge the NDP’s accusation the previous PC government is to blame for the problem.
In a statement last week, the province said the licensing office is also dealing with a glut of interest.
Around 8,000 to 9,000 licence applications are being reviewed annually, up from around 6,000 applications four years ago. That’s a response to a growing call in society for heightened security, Traeger said.
Jeff Stone, president and CEO of Tacit Investigations and Security in Winnipeg, said the failure to renew licences in time has led to a “snowball effect,” in which employees fed up with administrative delays are leaving the industry. That means more workers must be hired, and there are then more applications to be reviewed.
“I wouldn’t be forced to have to look for another guard if their approval rate was more efficient,” he said.
Tacit has lost out on a few potential clients because he wasn’t certain his roster of around 25 security guards would have active licences in time, Stone said.
Administrative delays at the provincial office happen “quite regularly enough for it to be a concern, especially for smaller businesses,” he said.
“I can’t imagine what it would be like for the larger companies.”
Wiebe said his office is exploring ways to modernize the licensing process by looking at more online options.
The government recently implemented a voicemail-to-email service for a more efficient follow-up to emails, he said.
Some security guards in Manitoba are temporarily losing their jobs due to a licence renewal process bogged down by inadequate staffing and a spike in applications, the head of their union says. Since they cannot legally work without an active licence, the security guards have to stop working while they wait for the renewal.