News Article

Sask. Employers Saluted for Helping Reservists

Will Chabun, Leader-Post
1 June 2011
 
The choice presented to Trent Belisle was blunt: quit the army reserve or quit his civilian job.

His employer in Moose Jaw — a firm no longer in business there — didn’t want to give him any time off for training.

So he made his choice: he stayed in the army.

It’s to spare military reservists from unpleasant decisions like this that the Canadian Force Liaison Council educates employers on why they should not only keep, but cherish, staffers who wear uniforms away from work.

The council also honours employers who do a particularly good job of this, on Wednesday singling out for awards 20 organizations from across Canada — including two from Saskatchewan.

“We look at it as an investment because of the kind of personnel the CF (Canadian Forces) is producing with leadership courses and training,” said Steven Atkinson, Saskatchewan general manager of Waymarc Industries, a warehouse supply and design firm with branches in Regina and Saskatoon that was one of the firms honoured in Ottawa.

“There’s some juggling that has to be done,” conceded Atkinson, whose firm was nominated by Saskatoon staffer Guy Woloschuk, whose job was kept open while he spent 18 months in military training, then in Afghanistan as an infantryman. “But there are tons of reservists who don’t go, so you have a fairly open pool of good guys and girls who can help you out.”

Atkinson walks the walk: the former member of the Royal Regina Rifles says seven of his firm’s 10 Saskatchewan employees are serving or former reservists. He said their work ethic and skills “really made us lean toward at least look at reservists first, for every kind of position.”

The key to making this work is communication — starting with the army itself, said Cliff Walker, the long-time reservist who’s CEO of Commissionaires Saskatchewan, the other Saskatchewan organization saluted for supporting its reservists.

“The more notice you can give to your employer that you need to be away, the easier it is for him,” said Walker, who currently has veteran staffer Norm Marner serving in a multinational unit assigned to counter Afghani insurgents’ improvised explosive devices.

The payoff is the discipline, organizational skills and leadership that soldiers bring back with them, said Walker. “The old adage that ‘they’re twice the citizen’ — it really does hold true.”

Copyright 2011 The Leader-Post. Used with permission.

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