David Butler:  

s Board {Pay Research Bureau} and that is basically where I stayed for most of the next 20 years. Somewhere along the line, I actually made it up to a CR-4 position, but in 1987, the government decided that they had to cut back and they started downsizing. My department was not exempt from those orders. A decision was made to cut-back two positions per year for the next five years, and unfortunately, a Librarian Assistant and myself were chosen to be the first two positions to be eliminated. Strangely enough, the Librarian Assistant was able to get herself declared as being 'blind' and therefore she could not be let go. I, on the other hand, was seconded to Environment Canada's Parks Division initially for 4 months and then a second secondment for another 4 months after which I was offered a position subject to a 6-month probation period. Since they had had my services already for 8 months, my counselors should have advised me to have them take out that 6-month probation clause, but they didn't and at the end of the 5th month, the EC staff decided not to keep me, telling me that I now only had 1 month to find another job. None could be found. So after nearly 24 years of loyal, pensionable service, I was let go ... with no Golden Handshake like so many others had gotten. After that I started working through Staffing Agencies doing similar jobs to what I had been doing previously. One of those assignments thought to be for two weeks initially was actually for two months, followed by an offered Shadow Term with Communications Canada in the fall of 1988. As happens from time to time, an election was called and Flora MacDonald, the Minister for Communications, lost her Kingston & the Islands riding seat. After all the results were in, Flora decided to give all the Staff a party, as her way of saying thank you to everyone. On that day, I had been working in the stockroom, as usual, since the person who I had been hired to replace had returned to work shortly after I had accepted the six-month Term; my work included setting everything up for the party and before the end of the day, my colleagues and I were invited to attend, as well. Afterwards, while riding home on the bus, I wrote a couple of poems - one for a Commissionaire who was about to retire and the second about the similarities between my job ending on December 31st and Flora having lost her seat. As a result of writing and eventually presenting the poem to Flora, herself, in front of all of her Deputy Ministers and their respective staffs, my term was extended until the end of the fiscal year on March 31st. However, the next person in charge at that level was a French-canadian and since I was (am) not bilingual (partly due to a hearing loss at lower tones), my term was no longer extended. I went back to working through Agencies and had a brief stint as a CR-5 with the National Research Council of Canada (NRCC) and two four month terms with Transport Canada's Air Traffic Control (the fore-runner to the Nav Can) section. Unfortunately, they ranout of money for casual help in their budgeting (before funds could be moved from one Project Code to another, under their FINCON accounting system was changed). After that their was a brief stint with Foreign Affairs before deciding to go back to school ... this time at a higher level. COLLEGE (and University) YEARS I had already proved Mr. Coleman's prediction wrong during my first couple of years while working in the Public Service. Through Carleton University, I had taken and passed a couple of night courses ... Political Science 100 and Economics 100, but I did not have any specific goal in mind, so I did not continue taking these types of courses until I became enrolled in a series of courses leading to a designation of a Certified Management Accountant. While taking a Data Processing course in that series, a personal friend of mine, a City of Nepean Police Officer was shot and killed while he was on duty. I became distraught by the affair and stopped taking the courses, all together. Finally, in the fall of 1991, I enrolled in Algonquin College's new (then) Business - Information Systems Diploma course and by June 1993 with a GPA of 2.70 I had graduated. Many of my fellow clasmates went on to study Computer Programming, but based on my experience with dBase IV programming, I thought that Technical Writing would be better. Therefore, I followed the TW Diploma program and eventually graduated with a 2.84 GPA and Diploma by the end of November 1995 while still working with Canair Hovercraft Limited. However, that company and I went our separate ways when they could not pay for all the extra hours worked on their behalf, as they had lost a lot of their funding for their projects.