HRPD Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT AND THE STATUS OF PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES

COMITÉ PERMANENT DU DÉVELOPPEMENT DES RESSOURCES HUMAINES ET DE LA CONDITION DES PERSONNES HANDICAPÉES

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Tuesday, May 4, 1999

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[English]

The Chairman (Ms. Albina Guarnieri (Mississauga East, Lib.)): May I have everyone's attention?

Seeing a quorum, I'd like to welcome Trish Stovel, executive director, and Beverly Brown, co-ordinator of the labour adjustment program, from the Metro Labour Education Centre.

Please begin.

Ms. Trish Stovel (Executive Director, Metro Labour Education Centre): Thank you. I'm still trying to get my technology straight, being a typical older worker. I can't get my earphone in, but I'll get it together when you have questions.

The Chairman: By your opening comments I can tell we're in for a treat.

Ms. Trish Stovel: First of all, I'd like to thank you all for inviting us here. This is a tremendous opportunity for us. As many of you may know, labour councils, federations of labour, and the Canadian Labour Congress have long been concerned with the lack of services to our members who have lost their jobs. We really appreciate the opportunity to meet with you and to share our experiences and suggestions, to hopefully work together and mutually improve the lives of older displaced workers.

Unaccustomed as we are to coming speak to people in Ottawa, we brought materials but they are unfortunately only available in English. I understand the clerk will get them translated for you. So if I miss a beat, it's because I'm making references to things you don't have. Please bear with me.

I'm the executive director of the Metro Labour Education Centre, MLEC, and we are a special project of the Labour Council of Metropolitan Toronto and York Region. We are incorporated as a non-profit organization, an integrated worker education centre that provides education and training services to employed and unemployed workers.

With me today is my colleague, Bev Brown. Bev will be able to talk to you about the personal experience of going into plants. Bev is a displaced older worker herself. She was vice-president of the local at the Inglis plant that closed in 1987. Much of our programming has developed from that point.

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We're here today to talk about our experiences. What we are particularly interested in is a holistic adjustment model for displaced workers. We're going to talk about barriers to training faced by older workers in the current system, about the impact on the non-profit training infrastructure, and, of course, about some proposals for your consideration for the task at hand.

Our centre has been funded since 1987 by HRDC to serve workers who have lost their jobs due to plant closures, downsizing, and bankruptcies. Until our funding was cancelled by the province, we were also the largest workplace basic skills program in Ontario, in that, in addition to ESL and upgrading, we pioneered to meet the technological change needs of workers' programs in technological literacy—computers and blueprint reading.

We have been funded by the province to do research in labour adjustment. One of our first reports was the impact of labour adjustment on immigrant women in plant closures. We've had a checkered past with HRDC because many of our programs are no longer funded. The early intervention model is no longer funded, despite the fact that in 1995 Ernst and Young was commissioned to do a report on our early intervention program and, according to them, the result was better and faster re-employment. They said that workers had better choices and greater confidence through access to information and guidance, that workers' earnings were 65% higher than expected, and that the MLEC model proved to be a more effective service and a more efficient use of public and private sector resources, with reduced cost and cycle time. This is the program that we will be describing to you.

We are the country's lead organization for labour in terms of labour adjustment and have done much work with unions and community groups in the municipality. We helped the United Food and Commercial Workers Union set up their national adjustment program. We assisted the Canadian Auto Workers in developing their own adjustment program. We have also worked with the municipality and have done a community economic development demonstration project showing the positive results of an early warning system that would prevent plant closures—we would like to get out of the funeral business.

We were a Transitions broker. Transitions was a provincial program for tuition for workers over 45. We were the largest in Ontario. We were also an action link for the health sector training and adjustment program in Ontario, HSTAP, and we have active partnerships with things like CSTEC, the Canadian Steel Trades Employment Congress.

We have worked in over 220 plant closures, not just in metro Toronto, but all across Ontario, and Bev has been there—Elliot Lake, Red Lake... Also, we have often been asked... we went in to train the Volvo committee in Halifax and we did the Coca-Cola closure in Halifax, so while we are Toronto-based, we have worked all over the country and, in some cases, in the States.

Our organization is also fully involved in all of the kinds of organizations, practitioners, and policy-makers in the field of employment and training. I have staff on the local training boards, both in Toronto and in York Region. I have worked with the city for six years in economic development and currently sit on the mayor's steering committee on economic development with my natural colleagues, the president of the Board of Trade and the president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. Actually, business and labour are always colleagues on the issues of job retention and job loss.

I was also a member of the metro Toronto task force on skills training and sit on every labour committee that deals with it. I'm also on the national advisory committee on older workers with the organization One Voice, who will be addressing you next. I'm also the co-chair of the umbrella organization for community-based trainers in Toronto, and I represent labour on the Ontario Literacy Coalition.

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Our roots are based in the manufacturing industry of Toronto. Much of our current work continues to be in this sector. Here, older workers have been hard hit. I understand you're looking for the age: at what age should we be considering people older workers? From our experience, workers aged 45 and up—

Mrs. Brenda Chamberlain (Guelph—Wellington, Lib.): Oh, no!

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mrs. Brenda Chamberlain: I want off this committee.

Ms. Trish Stovel: —and I understand we are all older workers.

Mrs. Brenda Chamberlain: This sucks.

Ms. Trish Stovel: Not all over 45, but some. The Ontario program, the Transitions program that I mentioned earlier, recognized that and targeted its retraining for those workers.

When older workers lose their jobs, they tend to remain unemployed longer. We understand that your committee had a presentation from Statistics Canada and left you with the impression that older workers were finding employment. This is not borne out by our experience. We think that perhaps they have left out the issue of discouraged workers, who will answer that they've just given up.

Of all displaced workers who failed to find new jobs, more than 75% were aged 45 and over. Among all workers who left employment between 1991 and 1996, fully one-quarter left as a result of layoff or plant closure. In 1994, 67% of all unemployed workers over age 45 indicated that they had been forced out of employment.

Serving older displaced workers in the Toronto area is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the size of the job market and the relative breadth of services tend to help workers find new jobs. On the other hand, this positive picture is superficial and masks the widespread difficulties facing older displaced workers. I'm sure that would be true of Montreal and Vancouver as well.

When a major industry shuts down in a one-industry town—and Bev has been there—much publicity and political attention focuses on the impact and the need for assistance and services. Certainly there are unique problems, such as the lack of alternative jobs and resistance on the part of displaced older workers to move from their lifelong homes.

The special needs of these situations do not, however, negate the equally severe problem faced when a long-standing industry in a major urban centre closes. It's very common that workers in such workplaces have over 20 years' seniority; the job may have been the only job the worker had since leaving school or coming to Canada. The wave of closures, major downsizings, and bankruptcies has not stopped. It has just become largely invisible. We emphasize, therefore, that the problem of older worker adjustment is indeed a major problem in the Greater Toronto Area.

Older job losers have special characteristics. They have more than likely not finished high school. Of Canadians aged 55-64, 46% have less than a high school education. They also lack technological skills, and technological skills are an employability skill. We've developed programs to meet this need. Ninety-three per cent of our clients have taken our two-week computer foundation program that bridges them to college programs and private trainers, but builds them up to succeed in those programs.

Literacy and English as a second language are particular issues facing older workers. Twenty-two per cent of Canadian adults cannot read well enough to deal with everyday reading requirements. The percentage of 56- to 65-year-olds testing at the lowest level of literacy skills is 44%.

For older workers, unemployment means shattered dreams, an insecure financial future, and the threat of poverty. Most were looking forward to retirement and income security in their older years. Unemployment in the twilight of their careers causes asset depletion and the loss of pension income and security, and many are forced into early retirement.

We understand that Statistics Canada's presentation to your committee cited “personal choice” as the answer displaced workers gave when they retired. One wonders if those interviewed were given the option of answering “no choice”. In a 1990-92 StatsCan survey of persons not in the labour force, 211,000 retirees said they had retired earlier than planned. Forty-two per cent cited economic reasons, half of whom specified job loss.

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There is no doubt that the unemployment rate is distorted by the high number of “discouraged” workers, who come to be counted as early retirees rather than the unemployed.

Older unemployed workers extract a heavy cost from the public purse. Aside from the billions of dollars paid out in EI benefits and social assistance, in 1994 over $14 billion in earnings were foregone to the Canadian economy and $4 billion in tax revenue was lost. Combined with older workers' depletion of savings, Canada will have an even bigger problem in the near future with elder poverty. After decades of thrift and hard work, older workers are rewarded by their savings being taken away at a point in their lives when it's impossible to replace them.

In our experience, older workers clearly benefit from a holistic model of adjustment. In August 1998, Toronto HRDC did a consultation on older workers, and this was the major recommendation: under one roof, older workers can access assessment, case management, employment-related workshops, upgrading and technological literacy programs, career planning, counselling, and assistance on training, job placement, and follow-up. This is exactly the model we have at MLEC.

The current silo system of adjustment services is fragmented and poorly serves workers. For example, training purchase is divorced from case management. Older workers need counselling to ensure training choices meet their needs. It takes time to build confidence with a counsellor, a process that is impossible when workers are required to go to several different places for different related services.

Pre-closure adjustment is also highly effective. We worked with the GM van plant for two and a half years before it closed, delivering upgrading and computer courses—all while people were employed. Therefore, those services were not required when they hit EI. Another effective approach—and I would hope that the committee would invite some people from these areas—is the sectoral model used by the Canadian Steel Trades Employment Congress, CSTEC, and MITEC. MITEC is a recently established sector council for the mining industry. They are doing some very interesting work and, I think, would have something to say.

In the area of training, older workers are disadvantaged before layoff. Workers aged 55 and over are only half as likely as workers under 45 to receive employer-supported job-related training. When we started our adjustment program in the late 1980s, according to HRDC locally, workers did not want retraining. They said that 80% of workers who had lost their jobs did not want retraining. We found that when we went in and spoke to workers about the labour market, about the skills needed, and about retraining information and programs to support, 80% asked for retraining. We gave our own adjustment staff the title of “training advocates” to reflect workers' interests.

Older workers face a number of barriers to training. In the past, workers from declining industries were encouraged to train in a new career. However, when HRIF came in, workers were told that training must be consistent with past work experience—ha ha—even if there were no secure jobs in those fields. Recent policy now allows a career change. However, practice does not always match policy, and it remains difficult to get approval for training in a new field.

Previously, workers could extend their benefits for up to one year for upgrading and up to 64 weeks for skills training. Even before HRIF came into place, language upgrading was undermined. First, only workers with grade 8 and above could get upgrading, and second-language speakers who had been in Canada for a long time were not eligible for the LINC program. With HRIF, upgrading became almost completely inaccessible.

The limits on training make it impossible to meet workers' needs. In Toronto, the limit is 26 weeks. What has happened is that private trainers in particular have taken the courses that used to be 64 weeks long or 52 weeks long and have compressed them to 26 weeks. For older workers, especially those who need upgrading, like numeracy, literacy, or whatever, to compress that, it's... they will fail in that training.

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The cancellation of the Ontario Transitions program has also made training much more inaccessible, because EI clients could access Transitions. Workers over 45 benefited from the $4,500 tuition grant combined with counselling. It was an excellent program, one I think the committee should look at.

Since 1997, unemployed workers have been required to undergo a means test before training funds are granted. Total family income and expenses are reviewed. Workers are expected to use their savings. There are no consistent and transparent guidelines used in the means test. Thus, one worker may be granted $1,000 while another worker in the same situation will be granted $2,000. This inconsistency is tied to the current training brokering system. It is up to the training broker whether training is provided and how much money is granted. They're a different group from ours; we are dealing with the worker.

We've seen a very big difference in the patterns of decisions, and the system can only be described as arbitrary and inconsistent. Soon, the only option will be to go into debt to purchase your training, particularly if this is based on family income. Older workers, who are trying to pay for their children's post-secondary tuition, will not be in a position to take on their own loans. It's important to note that dependent children are present in 57% of families with an unemployed household head between the ages of 45 and 54 and in one-third of families with an unemployed head between the ages of 55 and 64.

I talked about the loss of direct purchase of training. HRD used to do that. Now others do it. This has had a very negative impact on the training infrastructure. For instance, colleges are now unable to offer ESL in literacy upgrading programs and, in Ontario, with the provincial downloading to the municipalities, school boards can now no longer offer that training.

The current approach to how programs are judged to be effective is a great concern to us. In the field, they are looking at only the short term: savings to the UI fund within a year. Organizations are judged by their success in job placement. We've heard that some provinces are thinking of paying their payment as a placement fee as opposed to a service fee. The current short-term evaluation and that kind of proposal leads to what we call “creaming”: encouraging organizations to avoid the hard-to-place workers in favour of easy-to-place, well-educated, high-skilled candidates. This approach is disastrous for older workers, who require a broad range of interventions. The long-term impact of adjustment—employment assistance services, placement, training, and getting them into secure, well-paid jobs—will not be seen for several years.

Briefly, decentralization and siloing are at such a ridiculous level in the field that Toronto is seen as seven different labour markets. Seven! There is some co-ordination, but not enough. It's such a point of frustration for business and labour in Toronto, and as a member of the City of Toronto's economic development committee, I can tell you that the city is very concerned about how we maintain our skilled labour force. Looking at the system currently, we do not see how we can address it with the seven different labour markets when we've become one.

The situation is so bad that our centre had to go to the population health fund of Health Canada rather than to HRDC to seek funding for a holistic adjustment model for older workers. We do not feel we should have to search from ministry to ministry to fund holistic adjustment programs. Human Resources Development Canada should themselves champion this model and seek opportunities to transfer the successful experience of holistic adjustment for displaced workers.

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On June 30, the transitional skills grants will be coming in. Workers will get money and will have to purchase their training from an institute that can grant a tax receipt. This will completely freeze out all the non-profit community-based trainers. We are unable by law to grant tax receipts. That means that workers will not be able to come and take the employment preparation and life skills training that the community-based community has been offering for years. We have lobbied about this at a local level. I'd really appreciate it if someone could help us out.

In Ontario, there's the devolution issue. The labour market development agreement has not been signed. We would love to see it not signed. Devolution in Ontario is going to be disastrous. Harris will use this to play out his privatization agenda as well as other things. Right now in Toronto, 87% of the people served by HRDC are provincial social assistance clients.

Okay. What can we do... Of course, there is a thing called earning supplements in the part II measures. I don't know if people are aware of it. I have an HRDC report here somewhere, done by applied research. We have asked repeatedly for this measure to be looked at for older workers—not the targeted wage supplement. In that older worker consultation last year it was unanimous; people said not to use the targeted wage for older workers. We do not have to bribe employers to take valuable, skilled, loyal employees. What we do have to deal with is helping those who are coming down from very highly paid jobs or more highly paid jobs who will not look at lower-paying jobs because it's too much of a drop.

The earning supplement will broaden older workers' job search choice, and that, coupled with comfort in learning, retraining, and the income supplement, with their work skills and whatever, we think they will get their employment up naturally in that new place—but they need the assistance of the earning supplement.

I know that you've looked at the POWA program, and I've read some of the things. Yes, it had a lot of glitches, but POWA was useful. The main glitch we had with it was that it was determined by workplace and not by individual. It should be an individually based possibility. However, having said that, there is the issue of older workers being forced out by employers—in unions, we have our own education to do—and we don't want POWA to be used for those people who would like to be re-employed.

I also understand that you've been looking at the self-employment initiative. In 1995, we got a grant from Ontario's Community Economic Development Secretariat, and we used that as an opportunity for labour to come to grips with what local economic development was. We came up with a definition for us, which says that local economic development should be, in order of priority, job retention strategies, job conversion strategies—assisting organizations to convert into the new economy, the export market—and thirdly, job creation.

We looked at the self-employment assistance initiative. We find it inappropriate for our clients, who are primarily older workers. However, there are community economic development options that could work—things like worker co-ops or community-held businesses. We think those would be viable, but the current SEA program does not give adequate time for development and training to support that. But it's something you could look at, particularly in your rural areas where you're looking at the one-industry towns.

With regard to research and development, we are very concerned with the demise of the CLFDB. They did some very good work in terms of monitoring and evaluating the impacts of programs. They are gone now, so we are very concerned about what's going to happen. Research is vital for the ongoing development of new methods and approaches. So we're suggesting that organizations with a direct interest in older workers—things like One Voice, the Canadian Labour Congress, literacy coalitions, community-based groups, and municipalities—should have some role here.

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The other thing we would very much like to see is that consideration be given to the creation of a new office or unit in Human Resources Development Canada whose mandate would be to oversee and co-ordinate all specialized older worker services as well as to disperse funds for research and development.

In conclusion, we would like to reiterate the importance of public policy and programming that allows medium- to long-term programs for older displaced workers. Early intervention, pre-closure services and comprehensive one-stop, post-layoff adjustment services have not been funded in practice, but we believe they are possible within the current legislation.

That, coupled with the right to retraining, with guaranteed access, adequate time, full income support, and funding for ESL, literacy, upgrading, and technological training, in addition to the current employment assistance services and things like POWA and earning supplements, increased assistance with job placement... Older workers have great difficulty mining the hidden job market. They really need that service.

Again, we'd like to thank you for the opportunity to meet with you today. We're delighted that the committee is taking up this extremely important issue, and we will certainly do everything we can to provide you with further information or to point you in the direction of people who know more than we do.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Ms. Brown, do you have comments or should we proceed to questions?

Ms. Beverly Brown (Co-ordinator, Labour Adjustment Program, Metro Labour Education Centre): I don't really have any comments, but I would like to just talk about some statistics in a particular plant that we're working with now, just to give the committee some idea of the kinds of clients that we get throughout the year.

This plant is located right in downtown Toronto. We assessed 161 workers there two weeks ago. Ninety-nine of them are 45 years or older; that's a very high number of workers in that plant. Sixty-seven of those 99 had worked at the company for 20 years or more, some up to 33 years. Fifty-one of the 99 are sole income earners with no other financial support. Eighty-eight of them earn over $16 an hour. For 60 out of 99, English is their second language. There's a very high number in this plant who have below a grade 12 education. Just to give you a number, 37 have grade 8 or less; these would be people who have grades 3, 4, or 5, who came to Canada from Portugal. I think the three main language groups were Portuguese, Italian, and Greek.

When you think of those figures and look at the kind of earning power that these workers had—$16 an hour with a grade 5 education—given the current situation, where are these workers going to get any kinds of jobs that that would pay even half of what they were making there? Let's be realistic. For sole income earners, that's a pretty tough situation to be in.

Seventy-two have no computer skills. When asked about their need to find a job, 23 of the 99 in that age group—in these statistics, I'm just talking about the ones who are 45 or older, but we have a more detailed report which you'll get later that shows this—said their need to find a job was urgent. We're talking about older workers who are anywhere from... I said 45 or older, but some of those workers were 55. As we were doing the data entry, one of the support staff said, “This guy is 64 years old and his need to find a job is urgent.” He's one year away from retirement, but there's a very low pension in terms of their ability to have any kind of income support or even to retire early.

When you look at those kinds of statistics and you hear that 23 out of 99 need to find a job... Given that, we know that their age is going to be a major barrier for them in getting alternative employment.

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We asked them what they considered to be the most severe challenges in finding a new job. I'm just going to read the numbers and tell you what they said: 77 said unknown job market, 42 said lack of education and training, 35 said poor reading and writing skills, and 34 said lack of marketable skills. These are things that they've self-identified. Out of 99, 75 indicated that they wanted some sort of information, not necessarily retraining, but information in regard to an interest in retraining. Out of 99, 49 of them wanted to improve their reading and writing, 36 wanted to improve their math, and 35 wanted to improve their speaking skills.

So they already know what the barriers are. All they have to do is read the newspaper and talk to their friends and neighbours. When going through the assessment process, a number of them stated that they were relying heavily on their employer—who is now their past employer, as they were all laid of as of April 30—and the union to find them jobs. That's just because they know what's out there. The interest in retraining...

When most of these guys were hired at this company—and this is fairly across the board for all of the workplace downsizings and closures that we deal with where there is an older workforce—they didn't need to have grade 12, they never had to have a resume, and they never went interviews. Most of them were hired without even filling out an application because their mother, brother, father, uncle, or aunt—somebody—directed them to that employer. They didn't need to have special training. If an employer went into production, they'd open the front door and grab the first body walking by; if you were walking and breathing, you got the job. There was none of this grade 12 education and interview skills where you had to go through what workers have to experience now. Is it any wonder older workers have so many barriers facing them when they're faced with unemployment?

In regard to programs like the POWA program, I happen to know about it personally because I came out of the Inglis plant in Toronto that was POWA-designated. One hundred and thirty of our workers qualified for the program for older worker adjustment, and some of them are now just finishing. As you, 1999 is 10 years since that plant closed, so some of them are in the tail end of that. Those workers had a lot of advantages that a lot of other workers did not have, nor will any workers subsequently have them unless there is some sort of a program like POWA, which is a safety net that catches them. Those workers had advantages that a lot of other workers don't ever have. That safety net was there to catch them and bridge them to age 65.

It really becomes a case of the haves and have-nots. In 1991, when our plant was designated, out of all the closures and downsizings, with older workers who at that time were experiencing job loss, only 595 workers in Ontario qualified for the POWA program. Really restrictive and strict criteria did not allow a lot of workers in there.

There's one more thing I just want to say about this workplace in particular and about other workplaces where there are older workers. Here we found a number of workers—not a large majority—who, because it was heavy work and hard lifting, had been injured on the job and subsequently were still working but not in the same jobs. The employer found them light work, modified work, other types of work, so that they did not have to do that heavy lifting. Some of them are on small WCB pensions that will continue and have continued.

But for this workforce in particular, a number of workers there have that additional barrier of being not being physically fit. They would probably not pass a medical test if they were to be put through a medical for another employer. That raises a whole number of other issues that older workers face, particularly if they are injured and hurt on the job. As you know, an employer is required to provide some sort of work for them. Then, when that employment is lost, those workers are in even more jeopardy than workers in the same age group because they don't have the ability to go and just get another job.

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The Chairman: Madam Brown, we have such a long list of questions—

Ms. Beverly Brown: Sorry.

The Chairman: —and obviously your insights have provoked a lot of thought. Perhaps we could proceed to questions.

Mr. Johnston, I understand you're sharing your time with Diane Ablonczy.

Mr. Dale Johnston (Wetaskiwin, Ref.): Thank you, Madam Chairman.

Thank you for your presentation, ladies. I noted that you spoke about one particular plant that had a very high incidence of illiteracy. It makes me wonder just how widespread the literacy problem is in unemployed older workers. When you refer to illiteracy, are you talking about the ability to read and communicate or are you talking about technological literacy as well? Can you give me some figures on that? You did talk about a 22% illiteracy rate in your presentation, Ms. Stovel, but I didn't quite grasp what...

Ms. Trish Stovel: The statistics I had were that 22%—these are from AILS, and the national literacy secretariat in HRD will probably be able to give you even better ones—of Canadian adults cannot read well enough to deal with everyday reading requirements. They cannot use written material to acquire new skills. A further 26% can only read materials that are written and designed clearly. For those workers who were aged 56 to 64, 44% came in at the lowest level of literacy.

You talk about technological literacy. Our experience is that 93% of our clients take our technological literacy program, and that has been consistent across the board. You could almost go 100% on technological literacy. Coupled with that, as you know, is the way the new system has been set up with the stand-alone resource centres; people are expected to know how to use a computer in order to be able to even go in and access a kiosk.

Mr. Dale Johnston: Yes.

Ms. Trish Stovel: That's why centres like ourselves... They don't fare well there.

Mr. Dale Johnston: Of course, in the kiosk, it is sort of self-instructed; it's just a touch on the screen. It just says “touch this for English or French” and then basically it's instructions... Even I can run one of those things.

Some hon. members: Hear, hear.

Ms. Trish Stovel: Yes, but you'd be surprised—

Mr. John O'Reilly (Haliburton—Victoria—Brock, Lib.): But you'd never find a job—

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

Ms. Trish Stovel: But you couple that with—

Mr. Dale Johnston: We're told that ex-politicians can't find a job anywhere—

Ms. Trish Stovel: Well, yes, but—

Mr. Dale Johnston: —and most of us are older workers.

Ms. Trish Stovel: Then you throw in the language issue with English and French... The reason we have the largest workplace program in Ontario is that in Toronto 60% of the workforce was second-language speakers or older workers, older Canadians, particularly from the maritime influx to Toronto, when they came with their grade 5 or grade 6 educations. That's how we started our English-in-the-workplace programs.

Mr. Dale Johnston: Maybe this is a very broad question. It will be my last question and then I'll defer to Ms. Ablonczy. What do you think would be the one thing that could be done right away to improve the lot of the lower-skilled, older, displaced worker? What is the first step we should take? What kinds of cost implications do you see attached to that?

Ms. Trish Stovel: Well, there's—and this isn't just ourselves, this came out of the older worker consultation in Toronto—the issue of a holistic adjustment service. “Holistic” means that from the time they lose their job to the time they get re-employed, they get served by a third-party deliverer that specializes in older workers. Those services are currently funded within existing funding. They just aren't specified for older workers, and unless you are as tenacious as we are, you can't do it all under one roof.

Mr. Dale Johnston: So it is a one-stop shop.

Ms. Trish Stovel: The money is just a question of... Whether it's MLEC or Jewish Vocational Services or the YWCA or Woodgreen Community Centre, we are all capable of and always did in the past have holistic services. It's this siloing, which is an interpretation in the field of how things have to be done; it is not the mandate of the legislation. I would say that is probably your critical piece to do.

What would you say, Beverly?

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Ms. Beverly Brown: That... and unless you have a way of encouraging employers to hire mature, experienced workers.

Ms. Trish Stovel: We know they're not supposed to discriminate in regard to age, but we also know that choices... that they're going to take the younger, more agile... We know that's the reality that is faced, so targeted job placement is one of the things we've been talking about. It's one of the first things we recommended to this particular plant: that the committee actually look at targeted job placement, encouraging employers to... If you go to an employer right up front and say you have a mature, experienced workforce, there's no doubt in the employer's mind about the age of the workers. That's opposed to just trying to do job placement and then have the worker show up for an interview when it isn't reflected in his resumé that he has 30 years of experience or when his age isn't on his resumé. He shows up for an interview and then all of a sudden is just not allowed.

Ms. Trish Stovel: In fact, I'd just like to add that we have tried to set ourselves up as older workers despite what the field does. In that, I tripled the number of staff devoted to job placement. It was tremendously successful, not just for ourselves but for all the community-based organizations, because we would share and co-operate. When I went back to the local HRDC and said I wanted to continue it, they said no. But it's possible. What Bev is saying is absolutely true, and I think One Voice will give you a lot around employer bias.

But again, on things like employer bias, I've worked with the president of the Board of Trade in other capacities and told him what we were up to around older workers. I asked him if he, along with the City of Toronto, would be willing to hold a forum where we can do an awareness number that will deal with the educating, because it's an attitudinal thing. He said sure, that he'd be happy to.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Madam Ablonczy.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy (Calgary—Nose Hill, Ref.): I'm just conscious of the time.

The Chairman: Yes, I've been watching the clock.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: I think maybe because of the brief time—

The Chairman: You still have three minutes.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: I'm sure my able colleague has covered this.

The Chairman: Thank you.

[Translation]

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold.

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold (Jonquière, BQ): Thank you for coming. I think your description is quite realistic. You set the record straight regarding the categories and you told us about the impact of the situation on older workers.

I would like to go a little further, because once we identify our problem, the idea is to try to solve it. At the moment, older people who want to get back into the labour market face two obstacles. Some companies do not want to hire them, and some SMEs are interested in hiring young people only; 57% of SMEs have very restrictive policies about hiring older people.

As you know, these older people have work experience. You have presented your ideas in a number of areas. Do you think governments should establish knowledge transfer programs, whereby older people can pass on the benefits of their experience to younger people?

Have you also looked into work transition, rather than retirement? Have you made a choice in this regard? Have you studied traditional retirement as compared to a new type of retirement? You were also saying in your brief, that there was a targeted wage gain supplement. You have some experience with that. I would like to hear what you think about these matters. Thank you.

[English]

The Chairman: Could I ask you to give concise answers? As Diane has been good enough to point out, we're running behind and we want to try to accommodate everybody's questions.

Ms. Trish Stovel: Okay. On your issue around employers and who they want to hire, I think I'll defer to One Voice, because they have superb stuff on that.

• 1155

With respect to the issue of whether there is something we can do about mixing and utilizing the skills and the maturity of older workers with younger workers, absolutely. I would see that in a workplace training situation, in mentoring, in that sort of thing. In fact, it is one of the things that we can convince employers of: that they can be the informal internal training coach to younger people.

It also plays a role in what I talked about in regard to community-held businesses or worker co-ops. When we had the Transitions program there were older workers who wanted to help the younger workers set up a business. They were willing to work with them because they knew those younger workers wanted to continue to work for a long time. They themselves didn't want to, but they were willing to share their skills and stick with those people in a new food enterprise. With Transitions—we used to call it the “silk and suits”—we could pick managers and marketing folks from that and stir, and you would have a little instant company.

I think there are two ways, one in the current workforce with employers encouraged to do so, and the other in the development of spinoff businesses, where older workers' maturity would really be an asset.

[Translation]

The Chair: Do you have any other questions?

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold: No, I prefer to wait.

The Chair: Thank you, that is kind of you.

Mr. Dubé.

[English]

Mr. Jean Dubé (Madawaska—Restigouche, PC): I have just a very quick question. In regard to these older workers, you're saying that in Ontario there was a program that was able to catch them. What was the name of that program?

Ms. Beverly Brown: It was called Program for Older Worker Adjustment. It wasn't just in Ontario. I believe it was funded federally 70% and provincially 30%. It was a national program—POWA.

Mr. Jean Dubé: So how was it rated? Was it a good program? How was it seen by the users of this program?

Ms. Beverly Brown: In terms of...

Mr. Jean Dubé: Was it successful? Was it a good program?

Ms. Beverly Brown: Oh, I think it was a very good program, because it allowed them to work temporarily, part-time; the money that they would get monthly would be reduced if they were working that month. But in regard to most of the people I know through the personal contact I've had, a lot of them were not able to make that transition from 55 to 65 and get any kind of full-time employment, so it did carry them through to age 65.

But the criteria were extremely restrictive. Just to give you a quick example, in the peninsula, on one side of the street, you could have a plant with 400 workers who were designated POWA-eligible and, on the other side of the street, another plant with 400 workers, with roughly the same demographics, which wasn't designated. The designation was based on the industry. One was a foundry and one was an electrical plant. The foundry was designated and the electrical plant wasn't. You could have husbands and wives working in one plant or the other, or your next-door neighbour... The criteria were so strict in terms of people who were able to get it.

Mr. Jean Dubé: That program is not in force any more?

Ms. Beverly Brown: It's not.

Mr. Jean Dubé: So that would probably be a recommendation from you.

Ms. Trish Stovel: Yes.

Mr. Jean Dubé: In New Brunswick, we had the New Brunswick Job Corps. That is probably the same thing.

Andy, is it probably close to the same thing?

Mr. Andy Scott (Fredericton, Lib.): Close.

Mr. Jean Dubé: It was very successful in New Brunswick, to be honest with you. The response from the older people in the private sector was very good. Let's say, then, that this is one of your recommendations.

Ms. Beverly Brown: Yes, only as Trish indicated earlier, it would not be designated by the plant or by the location but more by the individual.

Ms. Trish Stovel: Yes.

Mr. Jean Dubé: By the individual.

Ms. Beverly Brown: Because certainly workers who were between 55 and 65—the ones I talked about who had injuries or had other more severe barriers to employment—would be considered for that program, as opposed to someone who was, say, 55 and wanted to remain employed and didn't necessarily want to... There's a whole range of workers that I think it would fit very well.

The Chairman: May I ask for a quick point of clarification? I'm informed by our researcher that the program you refer to wasn't accepted by every province—

Ms. Beverly Brown: Alberta.

The Chairman: —and that it was subject to provincial approval.

Ms. Beverly Brown: Yes, it was. Alberta, I believe, was the only province that didn't participate.

The Chairman: And P.E.I.

Ms. Beverly Brown: P.E.I.?

The Chairman: Thank you.

Mr. Jean Dubé: So I can count on your support when I encourage the government to...

Ms. Beverly Brown: Oh, definitely.

Ms. Trish Stovel: Yes.

The Chairman: New Brunswick is the third province, I'm informed.

Any other questions, Monsieur Dubé?

Mr. Jean Dubé: No, I'm finished. Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Andy Scott, please.

• 1200

Mr. Andy Scott: We had Job Corps instead of POWA, and it is quite different. I wouldn't want the record not to make the point. It's more public service; it's an activist measure that will allow people to work in the public service for a certain percentage of the pay and so on and so forth. It's one of the menu of things that are available, but it's quite precise in this case.

I'm curious about whether you would observe that there is an urban-rural split here. If we accept that there's a broad menu of remedies to deal with this... So consequently, in some instances, it's retraining in a community where the unemployment rate is less than 7% or 8%. If the unemployment rate is 40% and the people aren't going to leave—they have their house paid for and so on and so forth—the remedy might be different.

I don't want to write people off and I don't want to pension people off or take any of those actions prematurely or without cause, but the reality is... Would you not agree that in the range of remedies there is a very activist measure, whereby you could turn someone's employment situation around quite quickly with training and so on, and there are other situations where that's not likely? Would you accept that? Are we being too quick to write people off?

Ms. Trish Stovel: Who do you want to write off?

Mr. Andy Scott: Nobody. I don't want to write anybody off.

Ms. Trish Stovel: Yes. I think there is a distinction—

Mr. Andy Scott: I'm asking the question because ultimately you'll get that response in an urban-rural split. If you're living in a community with 40% unemployment, the likelihood of retraining at the ages of 50 or 45... They're not going to leave because they own their house. There is a whole bunch of reasons.

Ms. Trish Stovel: The difference in the urban-rural... First of all, on the urban, while there are a lot of jobs, without the interventions we talked about—

Mr. Andy Scott: Agreed.

Ms. Trish Stovel: —the older workers won't get them.

Mr. Andy Scott: Agreed.

Ms. Trish Stovel: Again it gets back to that thing of only training for jobs. To me, in the rural situation, the emphasis is going to have to be much more on a local economic development approach like the Elliott Lakes have; Newfoundland has had various experiences with it, as has Montreal, but that's urban. I really think that your emphasis has to be on that job creation side and then the other interventions fall out—

Mr. Andy Scott: Okay.

Ms. Trish Stovel: —whereas we can find the jobs, and that's why I mention the development of spinoff businesses. The other part is the issue of looking at how to prevent those one-industry towns. That's where I think you need to talk to the sector folks, to MITAC, which is mining, to the resource-based folks, like the B.C. forestry group, because that's their challenge, and I think you might see something there. Worker buyouts is another issue.

Mr. Andy Scott: Could I just put on the record the fact the disability group—we're working on another subcommittee—has also mentioned the problem and the labour market agreements with regard to “creaming”?

Ms. Trish Stovel: Yes.

Mr. Andy Scott: People with disabilities are also victims of the stringent measures that are applied.

Ms. Trish Stovel: Oh, absolutely.

Mr. Andy Scott: I think it's important that we're hearing that from more than one place. I think it's important for the government to know that.

Ms. Trish Stovel: Yes.

The Chairman: I just have one very quick question. Earlier you cited an example about a group of individuals that did not want retraining. Can you recollect the example you cited?

Ms. Trish Stovel: If I remember correctly, I think what I was referring was the start of our program back in the late 1980s. The local CEC officers would tell us that workers did not want retraining. They used to say that MLEC was giving them too much information. They would say that 80% didn't want retraining. Our experience, when you told them, when they were given full information, was that 80% said, “Oh, okay, then, I do want retraining.”

The Chairman: What was their understanding of retraining that would have led them to initially say that they didn't want to be retrained?

Ms. Trish Stovel: Primarily financial, because they weren't told that they would get EI, they weren't told about the types of supports, they weren't told about what was out there, and they weren't given full information about the labour market. We used to see it. We would deal with people who went through a closure. Workers want to work, so if they can get another job, boom, they go to the other job. Then that plant would close. Often we would find people at the second closure, when they came back to us; that's when they realized they had to get retrained.

• 1205

The Chairman: Ms. Brown, the last word...

Ms. Beverly Brown: I can just give you a really brief example. In Toronto, we saw the deindustrialization of downtown Toronto. We saw places like Goodyear, which closed six years before Inglis closed. At that time, a lot of the workers at Goodyear wanted just another job. That was their main thing: “just get me another job”. They were like the walking wounded; they'd go from plant closure to plant closure. The issue of training did not become a reality until they had been in that cycle. All of a sudden, they said to us, when they ended up at Inglis, “I can't go through this again. I can't go to another job, work for a year or two, and then be unemployed again. I need to really look at and focus on what my options are for the future, and I need some sort of retraining because I do not want to be in this situation again.”

I had that, again, from personal experience and from people who came from those plants, then from Inglis. Subsequently we ended up trying to put them into retraining programs, and a lot of them did get retraining.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

Dale Johnston has already highlighted our vested interest in this study, as we're aging politicians. Thank you for coming and sharing with us some of the challenges facing older workers.

Thank you.

Ms. Beverly Brown: Thank you.

The Chairman: We'll suspend for two minutes.

• 1206

• 1208

The Chairman: Thank you. We'll begin proceedings.

Before we begin, I guess I should correct the record. I broke the cardinal rule. I speak only for myself as an aging politician: all my colleagues here are very young in spirit.

I would like to welcome Mr. Ivan Hale, national secretary, and Tony Palmer, director of business development, from One Voice—the Canadian Seniors Network.

I don't want to subtract from your valuable time, so please begin.

Mr. Palmer, are you beginning or is Mr. Hale?

Mr. Tony Palmer (Director, Business Development, One Voice—the Canadian Seniors Network): Mr. Hale.

The Chairman: Mr. Hale, please.

Mr. Ivan Hale (National Secretary, One Voice—the Canadian Seniors Network): Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be with you today.

It's interesting how much we want to resist aging, and it's an important notion: no matter what our age, we don't think of ourselves as “old”. I can tell you that when you meet with a group of seniors—and the directors on our board are all seniors—the joke is that a definition of a senior is somebody who's five years older than you are, no matter what your age.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

Mr. Ivan Hale: It is my pleasure—as one of the younger among us but one who is still categorized as an older worker—to be with you today and to have with me Tony Palmer, who is managing the older worker initiatives at our organization. In preparing to come here today, I happened to just dig back into the file and I noted that it was November 1997 when I appeared before this very same committee and used that opportunity to talk about older worker issues. I remember talking afterwards with the chairman at that time, who said you might be doing this kind of study, and I'm just delighted. The need is very much there, and I know that it's now coming to your attention.

• 1210

The big problem is that we tend to say that the need's too great and there's no solution. I would hope that we don't therefore abandon the problem, because our work in this area, which has gone on now for about seven years, suggests that there indeed are some very appropriate solutions. All we have to do is identify then and encourage them.

We are here today representing an organization that is concerned about aging issues in Canada. This happens to be the international year of older persons, and our organization is One Voice—the Canadian Seniors Network, La Voix—le Réseau canadien des aîné(e)s. Really, in a nutshell, our mission is to address issues that are of national concern to our aging population, and when I say it that way, it means that we're not just a lobby group for today's old. It means that we're looking at the long range, into the future. We strive to enable full and active participation in Canadian society by older adults. We do so in partnership with others and we operate in a non-partisan way.

Our involvement with older workers goes back, as I said, to about 1991, at which time we convened a meeting of what were emerging as community-based responses to older workers' needs. For well over a decade now, community-based not-for-profit agencies have existed in Canada to assist older workers to regain employment, but the experience has been sporadic and certainly uneven across the country, and all of them have been plagued with insecurity around funding. Their mandates have had to shift and evolve according to the whims, usually, of government.

Originally most of them were constituted to look at older workers. They defined older workers as those aged 55 and up, but because funding now invariably comes from the federal government, they've had to lower their age of clientele to as low as 45. In so doing, they've come to appreciate that the 47-year-old who finds himself unemployed today has many of the same challenges and needs as somebody who's 62 and unemployed today. So while it was done somewhat reluctantly, there have been some benefits in doing it.

But we're in a situation where there is a lot of confusion. As a country, we've not yet decided what the role of federal government is going to be in terms of assisting Canadians to regain employment—or find it, in the first instance—as compared to the role of the provinces as compared to the role of either private sector or voluntary agencies. I would just put that forward as an issue that needs to be further focused on. We don't know if we want all or some and whether the mix of those deliverers of service is going to indeed be different in various parts of the country. This is an issue that we very much feel needs to be addressed.

We have come to believe that there's a whole set of underlying principles that should be encompassed, embraced, in establishing a vision for Canada that relates to older workers. We believe that all Canadians, no matter what their age, should have employment, as a basic right. It's an entitlement throughout the work span and is directly linked to gaining access to the benefits that any individual is entitled to. We believe that it's a requirement for effective participation in the Canadian democratic process and that nobody should be discriminated against on the basis of age, and for those with skills that are not up to date, support should be available to compensate and accommodate for those shortcomings.

We believe that Canadians have a collective responsibility to recognize and respect the demographic diversity of our nation as well as the demographic shifts that we're experiencing. We are an aging society that is soon going to have a seniors boom, with all the inherent and dramatic implications the baby boom had on our society. We're fortunate in that we have time to prepare, but it's going to hit us in a very short period.

We believe that a person's dignity and self-worth are very much linked to being able to continue to be a contributing member of our society, and employment is an essential part of that. We see employment as central to maintaining social cohesion in this country and, indeed, to keeping the country together.

• 1215

If we look at older workers and some of the suggestions that we would have to make today... I mentioned that there's currently a lot of redefining of the relationship of government in our society. The devolution of government may be the devolution of programs for Canadians—sad reality—and we have to prevent people from becoming casualties along the way.

But what is happening in the area of employment with the change in this labour force that we have? We're seeing a shift now, a move away from the federal government taking primary responsibility for employment support, a move into a signing of federal-provinical agreements across the country, and I would suggest to you that we have not been led to believe that there are adequate provisions in there to safeguard older workers' needs.

Certainly, as these new arrangements are implemented, somebody should be working as a watchdog. Somebody should be evaluating them, and we would suggest that as a very appropriate role for a federal government to be taking.

The local offices of Human Resources Canada, what used to be Canada Manpower offices, are now required to develop work plans or business plans. Is anybody looking at those business plans to see if they actually include older workers or disabled workers or other subpopulations? We've not been reassured on that when we've put the question forward.

When we posited the theory that perhaps older workers are going to be disadvantaged under these new federal-provincial agreements, the reply from very senior officials within Human Resources Development Canada was, “Don't worry. If it's not working out in three years, we can cancel them.” Well, what happens in the meantime? We would say that theirs is not the appropriate attitude or response.

In short, we would say that there is a place for and, indeed, a strong need for strong, central, national leadership, and that points to the federal presence. We believe that national standards of service and delivery should be in place. Initiatives such as public awareness initiatives, employer awareness initiatives, applied research, innovative workplace programs, research, policy development, and exploration of new trends and options in moving towards retirement are all issues that somehow need to be co-ordinated. We need to make sure that the appropriate studies are undertaken and that the lessons are learned and applied. That's not to suggest that the government itself should be doing all of that work; it's just saying that it should be ensuring that those things happen.

We also would like to recommend that the federal government, probably through Human Resources Development Canada, establish ongoing, stable relationships with partners. It is time to get away from the short-term project grants and contributions, which have absolutely no security for those who receive the money and which permit no long-range planning to take place.

There are national associations that you could look at, like the Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work and the Canadian Council on Social Development, and you could look to engaging seniors' organizations. There are others. I'm just saying that of course it's unrealistic to expect government to do it alone. There are social policy and service organizations that are ready and committed with respect to taking on part of this job.

Instead of perpetuating what too often is the silo or stovepipe approach of giving out grants and contributions to a myriad of organizations and then trusting that each will do its own thing without ever communicating with one another, could the government not think about possibly encouraging communication and sharing of experiences among those groups and, indeed, facilitate it and put a priority on making it happen?

• 1220

We also think there should be long-term financial support measures put in place to acknowledge the fact that older workers need more time and more skills upgrading in order to regain entry into the workforce. The story told by the previous witnesses was absolutely right. Everything they told you was correct. We've undertaken some national studies that fully support that, and I will cite just one of them.

We surveyed the Human Resources Canada centres, the manpower offices, all across Canada, with the exception of Quebec because it opted out of the study. It was a written survey, and we questioned both the managers, through one survey, and the front-line staff, through another survey, and asked them what they perceived to be the biggest problems or barriers facing older workers in their attempts to get back into the workforce. They said it is not that the older worker has the wrong expectations. In other words, they were saying that the older worker has already, in his or her own mind, made the adjustment to the fact that their skills are outdated, that they'll probably have to accept a job at less pay or with less responsibilities, or that they might have to relocate. They've come to that reality check. They've completed that before they hit the pavement and start looking for jobs, so that's not the problem.

When we asked what the problem was, then, those who were most experienced—the staff working with the older workers—invariably said that the problem was attitudes on the part of employers, that they were not giving a chance to the older worker. Well, how do we change attitudes? There are jobs out there, but how do we change attitudes? That's a mammoth task. There is some experience in having addressed such issues at a national level, but I venture to say that unless somebody takes it on and tackles it, we're going to be at the same point, lamenting the same condition, five or ten years from now.

But that's no excuse for inaction. We believe that all levels of government should be encouraging, fostering, supporting, and rewarding innovative workplace strategies that embrace older worker employment, training, development, and promotion issues, in both the private and public sectors. The public sector is not in a better position; we cannot claim that it's doing a better job of this than the private sector. But there are some isolated incidences of good news stories that are worth telling and sharing with others.

In closing, I'd like to make a few points. When we hear about the problems of youth, we're told that their biggest handicap to gaining access to jobs is that they lack experience. Lo and behold, today we're talking about experienced workers, and the experience shows that experience isn't enough. What does that mean? We have to think that through.

I just want to underscore the fact that “there but for the grace of God go I”. This could hit any one of us at any point in time, and when it does, it's like getting hit with a ton of bricks. The vast majority of older workers are not ready to retire; they are unable to, financially or emotionally, and the trauma and the turmoil not only affects you until the age of “normal” retirement but for the remainder of your life. So let's get at it.

Lastly, I want to put a positive spin on this. Older workers are a terrific resource. You now go into Reno-Depot and you're greeted by an older worker, and you go into your Wal-Mart and it's the same idea. You have companies like McDonald's trying to hire older workers. Why? Obviously because they're starting to clue in that these people are more loyal than younger people, that they have a sense of commitment and bring a quality and a stability to the workplace.

• 1225

While Canada is experiencing an aging workforce, so is every other country in the world, and I just want to suggest to you that this is a challenge faced by most societies. If we can look at it, address it head-on, and find some of the solutions, I would suggest to you that we will indeed—potentially—gain an important competitive advantage. That in itself should justify an investment of money in this area. Older workers continue to contribute by paying taxes, and of course the money goes round, so the investment is returned many times over.

There's just one last point. Look at who has withdrawn money from RRSPs. Unfortunately, a lot of the money taken out of them is taken out by older workers who have to sort of build the bridge until the time that they qualify for pensions. That's not a pretty picture: digging into your retirement savings when you probably still have a mortgage and when you likely still have dependents at home, because children are staying at home longer or are returning home.

So without wanting to paint any gloomy picture, I would say that there are some important initiatives underway. We have been undertaking some studies and do have a variety of reports that we'd happily make available to anyone at any time. Today we did bring with us copies of awareness kits that relate to older workers. If you'd like to take them, I believe they're on the back table.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

Mr. Palmer, do you have any quick comments?

Mr. Tony Palmer: Very quickly, thank you, Madam Chair, I will just point out that we entirely support the previous presenter's statistics. I think the committee should be aware that in the first instance it is estimated that the number of older workers will increase from its current level of about six million to about eight million by the year 2008-09. The impact, therefore, is going to increase exponentially as time goes by.

The other statistic to reinforce is the fact that once an older worker becomes unemployed, it takes him or her about twice as long as their younger counterparts to reach a level of employment again. Being an older worker and having been unemployed, I can tell you that it is a long and hard road to get back into the employment picture.

That's all I have to say. Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, sir.

Madam Ablonczy.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: Thank you for your presentations. As has been said before, most of us can relate to this issue, particularly as politicians. We know that sooner or later we'll be out of a job—or at least this job.

The Chairman: I'm glad she said it this time.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: We know that we have to look ahead.

I was interested in your comments about retirement. I understood from surveys that I have seen that the majority of Canadians hope to retire somewhere around 55. That seems to be a little bit at odds with what you've said: that people want to keep working. However, I don't think that's the particular issue. I think the issue is, for those who want to keep working or have to keep working, how can we make sure they have those opportunities?

You talked about “innovative workplace strategies”—I'm not sure what you mean by that, so I'd like you to expand on that—to ensure opportunities for older workers.

I'd also like to ask you this: what is the worker responsibility? Obviously this thing isn't coming as a bolt out of the blue. We know that not only is our population aging but our workplace is changing rapidly; you don't carry your lunch bucket to dear old Widget Works for 45 years and retire with a gold watch and a handshake from the president. That just does not happen any more. Every older worker knows that their job security is probably diminished considerably if not non-existent, that they're going to have to be adaptable, that they're going to have to change.

Are there responsibilities that we can assist older workers to carry out? For example, should we not have training funds available to put away, like we put away RRSPs? Education funds so that we can upgrade our skills... As my colleague said, I think a lot of us would be pretty much behind the times in the use of new technologies and information highways. Is there something that we need to be doing in having private funds, personal funds, allocated to that so that we don't come up against the wall at the age of 55 or 60 without adequate retirement and say, gee, I wish somebody would hire me, having done absolutely nothing to make ourselves hireable?

• 1230

Mr. Ivan Hale: You've made many good points. I'll try to respond to them quickly.

We're now trying to identify some of those innovations in workplaces where people have come up against a crisis and found a solution. One that we're aware of on Vancouver Island is a small company that manufactures forestry equipment. It's actually an aging workforce in there. Many of the men have been there for 20 or 30 years. They were finding that with the slump in the forestry industry the company was actually on the verge of bankruptcy. The employees bought the company and have now instituted many of the kinds of things that you're talking about in terms of retraining—and of cross-training of skills as well.

When those things work, we need to feature them and get a little bit of press for them, because, sadly, the media capture all the closures and not much of the good news stories. The good news stories tend to take time too, and they're not often very dramatic—and some of them fail along the way, so we have to acknowledge that.

Retirement planning is an important notion. When you ask most Canadians at what age they would hope to retire, they say they hope to retire at 50 or 55, but when you probe and ask them at what age they think they'll be able to retire, then they say, well, now it's most likely that I'll have to work until I'm 72 or whatever. So yes, that shift has happened, and people realize now that no longer can they depend for the bulk of their income in later life from pensions or from old age security, that type of source. They realize that they themselves are going to have to take responsibility for ensuring that they have an adequate quality of life in later years.

But that is small comfort to the person who has already embarked on a particular path with rules that were different. With regard to the flexibility to change your life plan, when you're already 55 you don't have many years to change, even if you intellectually acknowledge that it's necessary. You can't make a whole lot of shifts at that point.

What it does speak to is the importance of doing not just retirement planning, which tends to be done in the last few years while you're still in the workplace, but career planning, so that you begin at the time when you enter the workforce to think about what kind of a relationship you want to have in terms of stepping in and out of work and in and out of learning opportunities. The good news is that more and more Canadians of all ages are adopting a belief that there's much to be gained by lifelong learning. We are changing attitudes as we go.

You asked a question around access to training. I would just point out that in many workplaces today, access to employer-paid training opportunities is frequently denied to older workers. It is offered to younger workers and not to older workers. So while the worker may say yes, that's a responsibility, he or she may be denied the opportunity.

[Translation]

The Chair: I will now give the floor to the young Ms. Girard-Bujold.

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold: You're very kind, Madam Chair.

Many questions came to mind while I was listening to your presentation. I will start with your final comment. You say that young people should be thinking now about the age at which they will retire, 55 or 60. The situation we find ourselves in at the moment is very real. These young people will be able to expect quite a different situation, given that close to 6 million people, as Mr. Palmer was saying, are currently considered older workers. In this category, there are many older people who have lost their job or who will be losing it soon, and that is the group I am interested in. We will be able to educate young people. I hope we will find a way of ensuring that they plan their retirement and lifelong learning well.

I want to come back to these people who are facing massive job losses at the moment. They often find themselves in dramatic situations, because most of them did physical work in factories. Their health is deteriorating and they cannot retrain, because they don't have an appropriate education.

• 1235

What do you see for these people on the basis of your studies and surveys? Could governments do something immediately that would provide a way out or a breath of fresh air for these people?

Mr. Ivan Hale: I apologize for answering in English.

[English]

It's important to acknowledge too that while the retirement age in Canada has been dropping, there are many who question whether it will go down any further. Some are even predicting that it might start to go up again—

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold: Yes, that's right.

Mr. Ivan Hale: Involuntarily, people cannot perhaps retire when they thought they were ready—because they won't be any longer.

What is absolutely needed are ways to phase out of employment, ways to reduce the work week from perhaps 40 hours to maybe 20 hours, gradually, over time. It would be in the interest of the employee as well as the employer to permit that kind of flexibility within the workplace, acknowledging that in certain categories of jobs, people may be physically old while chronologically young.

I cite the example from the media just a week ago, when you had in Ottawa representatives from DEVCO in Cape Breton, who were talking about the miners who were losing their jobs through the DEVCO closure. What did they say? They said people who work in physically demanding jobs are often worn out well before they're ready to retire. The same was true of the Maple Leaf plants, the meat-packing industry, where your back gives out on you, so that you can't even perhaps continue in that.

Flexibility to perhaps reduce the amount of time spent working is important, but also important is the flexibility to be re-categorized or perhaps moved from a physically demanding job into a less physically demanding job, potentially within the same workplace. Those kinds of options are important. But it has to have a commitment to the employee, a commitment to provide them with the necessary training for the new job expectations.

[Translation]

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold: There are big factories in my region: Alcan, Abitibi-Consolidated, and so on. As you know, technological change is a fact of life in all these big companies, and that is what caused the layoffs. It is difficult for these individuals to adapt to the new technology, and they have not worked long enough to retire. As you know as well, the cost of living is high these days. People cannot retire on a pension of $15,000 or $16,000—that is the poverty line. These people were used to earning big salaries.

A program was established involving both levels of government at companies such as Alcan and Arvida. People worked 40 hours but were paid for only 38 hours; they were short two hours. They did that for three years. Anyone who wanted could be part of the program, and 1,800 out of 2,000 employees chose to participate in it. The two unpaid hours allowed people to accumulate leave, and older workers could work to build up the number of weeks or months they needed in order to retire.

The two levels of government did not want to repeat this program. It created 125 new jobs for young people and kept between 100 and 200 people working. As you can see, it was an active measure. Do you think this is the type of thing we should be doing, or would you suggest a different approach?

Mr. Ivan Hale: That should be an option.

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold: Do you have any other suggestions?

Mr. Ivan Hale: Yes, but I don't have them here today.

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold: I see. Could you send them to us?

Mr. Ivan Hale: Yes, certainly.

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold: Thank you very much.

[English]

The Chairman: Thank you.

Mr. Palmer, do you have a comment?

Mr. Tony Palmer: Not at the moment, thank you.

The Chairman: Madam Brown.

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Ms. Bonnie Brown (Oakville, Lib.): Thank you, Madam Chair.

There are so many things we could talk to you about. Essentially, with the demise of the POWA program, which was our only program for older workers, we have nothing special for them now. So if we were to recommend at the end of this that we get a program going, it seems to me that first of all we'd have to secure the resources to fund it and then we'd have to target it to get, as they say, the best bang for the buck.

I'm reminded of an election campaign, in the sense that when you're a candidate or a campaign manager, you have to make the same kinds of choices with few resources. You can go to a neighbourhood and go door-to-door and drop pamphlets in a neighbourhood where, say, they have a voting rate of 85% in terms of going to the polls, or you can go to another place where it's 30%. They're equally nice people, but obviously you go to the place where they turn out at 85%, because for every door you knock on, you only have to convince them to do one thing, and that is, to vote for you. In the other place, you first have to convince them to vote, to be committed to voting, and then to choose you. It's much easier to make the one step than the two steps with the other group.

This morning, for the first time, we saw a better picture of the urban manufacturing situation, through the Toronto and district labour council.

Prior to this, most of the examples that come to mind are what I call one-industry towns, like the DEVCO example, where the workers are, as you put it, worn out, where their health maybe isn't as good as it was a few years before, where there were often physical tasks and safety issues that they faced. They own their own homes in that community, their skills are very low, and their motivation is weak in regard to moving somewhere else where there might be a job. Therefore, we'd have to put in twice as much money. We have to put in money to retrain them, but before we retrain them we have to create local economic development, to build the kind of business that might employ them—and then we have to train them. It's a two-step process.

In an urban area, however, where there seem to be a lot of jobs but the workers who have been laid off don't have the training, all we have to do is train them. So it seems to me that it's only a one-step thing. With a massive transit system, you can get from almost any place in the GTA to any other place where there might be a job. The only thing you might be missing is the ability to do that job, which you might be able to be trained to do.

Do you see what I'm saying? We get these two pictures: DEVCO and B.C. mines in Thetford Mines, and the urban situation.

Mr. Ivan Hale: Yes.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: It seems to me that the better bang for the buck is in the urban situation, because all we have to do is train the people. We don't have to create the jobs.

Mr. Ivan Hale: I'm afraid that if you apply that logic... It's the same logic that has been given to those who manage the Human Resources Canada centres, namely, we have limited resources—

Ms. Bonnie Brown: Yes.

Mr. Ivan Hale: —so when a client comes in, assess which clients can get jobs most quickly at the lowest cost and invest in those clients. That's what's happening. And who is put at a disadvantage? Older workers.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: Yes.

Mr. Ivan Hale: So that it's slightly different... Whereas in your scenario, if I follow it, by investing in the urban areas, you're writing off the rural communities. I'm sure that's not your intention.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: No, I'm trying to figure out what we should do first. I think Mr. Johnston asked somebody earlier—I don't know if he asked you or the previous people—what they would do first. The two scenarios I've described are so different. Also, in my view, in the country there's a history of efforts to create businesses in places that need businesses created and it's like pouring money down a black hole. One can think of cucumber factories in Newfoundland and things like that. You hear these stories. I'm sure there are good stories as well, but it's the double cost of creating the work and then training a set of workers to do it.

But I see what you mean: the logic itself is dangerous.

Mr. Ivan Hale: It could lead you where you don't want to go.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: Okay.

I have one more question, Madam Chair, if I may...

There was some passion in your voice when you talked about the idea that HRDC should have stable relationships with its partners and that the giving of grants and contributions to these partners should require that communication and exchange of information take place among these partners. I don't know who these partners are.

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Mr. Ivan Hale: If I just take an example, there is a fund called the opportunities fund, which is, I think, something like $30 million a year, of which $27 million is administered through the regional offices and $3 million through their national headquarters. Its specific focus is on assisting disabled workers to gain access to jobs. Who are the partners? There are groups like the Canadian Paraplegic Association, the Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work, our organization, and about 15 or 18 others, I think.

But there are very few opportunities for cross-fertilizing and for sharing of experiences and ideas. Unfortunately, I guess everybody is just overloaded these days and we're trying to just do our piece. But when you slice everything up so often and you're only doing your piece, who's looking at the whole? That becomes the issue.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: Thank you, Madam Chair.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Mr. Wilfert.

Mr. Bryon Wilfert (Oak Ridges, Lib.): I'm sorry, Madam Chairman, that I missed the first presentation, but I had another committee to attend.

One of the difficulties, which I'm now experiencing almost first-hand, is a mindset issue with regard to the value of older workers—value in two ways. Of course for years we have put tremendous value and emphasis on young people, on youth. Obviously the shift is now moving towards the aging population; you talk about six million, going to eight million by 2008. But with respect to employers' attitudes, clearly there's a problem when they look at older workers.

In my own family, my wife, after 25 years of teaching, is no longer employed, not necessarily due to choice. She is now expensive—

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

Mr. Bryon Wilfert: She is expensive in many ways, but anyways...

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mr. Bryon Wilfert: She's expensive because of the fact that she's at the top of her category.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: Yes.

Mr. Bryon Wilfert: I wouldn't call her an older worker, although I did hear somebody say “45” here—

The Chairman: This sounds like true confessions.

Mr. Bryon Wilfert: The fact is, let's say she has probably 12 more employable years. She could have 15 more or 10 more, it depends on... We all like to retire early, and obviously none of us won the lottery on the weekend, or otherwise, I presume, we wouldn't be here.

So we have a lot of hopefuls here and no winners, and we have a lot of older workers but not that many jobs. The problem is that when you're at the top of your category in teaching, as an example, or in anything, you're not marketable because the attitude of many employers—and this is unfortunately what seems to have befallen her—is that they bring in some hotshot accountant who says, well, you have all of these older workers on your staff, and you could save a lot of money, like the cost of two workers, maybe two and a half workers, for one older worker, so let's... I'm being very liberal suggesting that older workers... I'm dropping it to 45 and on...

The attitude is that older workers are not employable, so we have a mindset problem, with people saying, well, yes, how do we reintegrate these people into the workforce? I don't know. We talk about job creation projects and we talk about earnings, supplementation, wage subsidies, and all of those things, but the reality is that people don't have the value of older workers even though they may have that experience. People say they cost too much.

She would love to retire at 50, but the fact is that you also have a certain lifestyle after a point, where you say that there's going to be a significant economic or social impact on that. I don't know what mechanism we... Part of it, obviously, is education, but part of it is that when people are downsizing and rightsizing and saying that they want to save a few dollars, the first target in any organization are those who are expensive. The expensive ones aren't the young people but the older people, and therefore we don't, as a society, attach the same kind of value that I think we should have. Maybe, as we get an aging society, we will attach the value, in 15 or 20 years, but that doesn't help the people right now who clearly are... It's almost like a cheap $10 suit you discard here; it's like, well, they're no longer... we don't need them so we'll just get rid of them.

The question is, what are the long-term and certainly the short-term impacts on our society?

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You talk about partnering. I guess what I would like to do is to see how we can develop some kind of... I hate using the word “program”, because it always sounds so institutionalized. We certainly have to try to educate people better, but we also talked about flexibility in terms of hours and maybe reducing some hours to keep people on. But I think we have to fundamentally change the mindset and the value and all of that, and I don't know whether we've been going down the right road with wage subsidies and all of those other things. I don't know whether that really is very helpful.

Mr. Tony Palmer: I'd like to make a couple of points, if I may address Ms. Brown's points as well, in a general rambling, if you'll forgive me.

The Chairman: Please feel free.

Mr. Tony Palmer: In 1995, Watson Wyatt produced a report on downsizing, re-engineering, restructuring, re-whatever-you-want-to-call-it, which basically said that 80% of the initiatives out there failed. They failed because the first thing to get cut was people. Companies would say on the one hand that “people are our most valuable resource”, but on the other hand, when the crunch came, they would get rid of them.

As Mr. Wilfert pointed out, older workers went first because they were more expensive. All of a sudden, companies started losing the history and the continuity that had made them successful. They had a bunch of younger workers who were keen, gung ho, and saying, “let's head towards the objective”, but nobody could figure out where the objective was because that mentoring process had gone.

This is one of the values that older workers bring to the workplace: this mentoring process. Yes, it generally costs more money on a per diem basis to keep an older worker, but his or her value to the organization is absolutely immense in terms of continuity, mentoring, and the development of protegés, so that the younger worker can take up the cudgel when the older worker leaves as part of his or her natural retirement process.

Let us look at nurses in Ontario. Check the want ads in Ottawa Citizen or The Toronto Star and you will find that there is a huge cry for nurses, because who got cut first when the medical restructuring went on in the province of Ontario? Nurses did. Who of the nurses got cut first? The experienced, higher-paid, longer-in-the-tooth—I guess I can say “long in the tooth” because I'm there—

The Chairman: And I am too.

Mr. Tony Palmer: That was a pure male remark.

So who of the nurses got cut first? Nurses who had years and years of experience. What's happening now is that hospitals are having to find nurses to replace those who have been lost, and it's very hard, because those who were cut in past restructurings have found other employment and are not willing to go back into the hospitals. So while Mr. Harris has put in more money to hire nurses, they're just not available. That resource has been lost to Ontario's medical system. I would suspect that this kind of example can be translated across the country.

What we need—Mr. Wilfert, you said you hesitated to call it a program—I would say, is a national strategy that starts but doesn't have an end date, so that when the program is over all the lessons learned, all the lessons developed in that program, aren't thrown out the window. We need a national strategy that is longer than the mandate of any one given political party in office, one that will carry the nation through to, I would suggest, the year 2020, where we start to see a flow-through of the youngest workers starting to move through the system and assuming positions of management.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

[Translation]

Do you have any other questions?

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold: No, I think he summarized things well.

[English]

The Chairman: If I might, I will just ask one quick question.

Mr. Hale, you asked who is looking at the whole, and, Mr. Palmer, you highlighted the necessity for a national strategy. If I can piggyback onto a point that Ms. Ablonczy was making earlier, in health care, for instance, we now have a strategy where the focus is on preventive medicine. Do you see a necessity to sort of highlight prevention rather than at the end of a worker's life span... Instead of waiting till they're laid off, should we be focused on a national strategy to retrain people on the job?

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For instance, maybe there could be a workers' training fund, an equivalent to an RRSP or something, whereby the worker can actually access training programs while currently employed. Have you conducted any studies or do you have any initiatives to suggest to us with respect to retraining the individual while on the job rather than when they're laid off?

Mr. Ivan Hale: We have not done anything in that area, but we've certainly come to the conclusion that prevention is the right way to be going, whether you're looking at it from the individual's perspective or from a sector perspective, where you're helping a sector go through a transformation into the future. Restructuring assistance for sectors or for employers would be equally important.

The Chairman: Mr. Palmer.

Mr. Tony Palmer: The medical model proves that prevention is cheaper than cure, so any strategy that recognizes the longer-term needs—i.e., preventing rather than trying to cure something at the end of the day—would certainly be supported by myself.

The Chairman: The U.S. Congress recently put out a report highlighting a training crisis in the United States. Do you have any similar documents that indicate similar trends here in Canada?

Mr. Ivan Hale: I'm not familiar with with any.

Mr. Tony Palmer: Nor am I. I can cite only one local example, from a local medical facility, where employees, regardless of seniority, are allowed one day per working year for training upgrading. Any other training that they do has to be taken either from vacation time or from sick time or from whatever.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Mr. Wilfert, you have the last question.

Mr. Bryon Wilfert: I have a quick question on this national strategy. What do you see as some of the key elements that would be part of that in order to obtain employer acceptance or public acceptance of that strategy, given the fact that we as a society are so far behind? We have aging parents, and yet, if you were to ask for a few weeks or a month or two off in order to take care of someone who is not institutionalized, you'd be one of those older workers in a hurry—you'd be out on the street.

So we have not moved at all as far as some jurisdictions like Sweden, for example, are concerned. I'm just wondering what kinds of elements you might see in there—very quickly—particularly if you're envisioning a program that may carry you for the next 20-odd years.

Mr. Ivan Hale: Because it's been in place for a number of years, it might be fruitful to look at the youth employment strategy to see what components of it have either worked or not worked. It could be instructive.

We would certainly argue that some strategies should give policy direction, to both employers and government, and, I would suggest, to labour, and ultimately to individuals. We would argue that it should ensure that up-to-date, meaningful research is being done and that the results are being disseminated. We would like to think that it would foster some innovative programs, some experimentation, and some evaluation; it's essential to have evaluation.

The Chairman: Your comments have inspired one final question from Madam Girard-Bujold.

[Translation]

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold: Mr. Hale, some older people—or wise people, because they prefer this name—who are on a committee came to meet with me. Nowadays, we don't know whether people are wise at age 20 or 90. These individuals told me that governments should be taking into account the significant volunteer work they do and consider giving them a tax credit in recognition of the many hours of volunteer work they do. What do you think about their idea?

[English]

Mr. Ivan Hale: It's a whole other set of issues. As a member of a national voluntary organization and the whole voluntary sector, we have grappled with that and have indeed met with the finance minister around that.

The difficulty, of course, is what value you place on the time of a person who is volunteering. If you start to give it credit, then do you have to credit everybody who's doing it?

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I will just give an example. I came out of meetings we had this weekend, when we were talking about informal caregivers for elderly people. A great amount of the informal care is being given by family members. If you give a tax credit for that to some of them, aren't they all going to want it? There's not an easy solution. It seems desirable. We already know that older adults are among the most generous not only in terms of their personal philanthropy but also in terms of their time. But they do it not wanting money or return; at the moment, it's done out of a commitment to share their goodwill, good fortune, with those who follow. What happens when you institutionalize it? I'm not sure Canadians want to see it institutionalized.

[Translation]

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold: In some cases, such a tax credit would allow them to increase their income. I don't think all volunteers would be interested in such a program, but we could target some of them whose jobs did not give them a full pension on retirement. I know we could not apply the tax credit to all older people.

Mr. Ivan Hale: We could certainly study this proposal.

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold: I'm passing on the proposal the group made to me.

[English]

The Chairman: Thank you very much for giving us, earlier, a new definition of what constitutes a “senior”. We're all better people for it. Thank you for a very thoughtful presentation.

Meeting adjourned.