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]

Thursday, February 26, 1998

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[English]

The Chairman (Mr. Reg Alcock (Winnipeg South, Lib.)): Ready? Let's come to order.

Good morning, all. Welcome to meeting number 17 of this committee, but meeting number 2, I guess, in reality, on this issue of the nature of work.

For the information of members, we have a series of presentations and discussions that we're going to have this morning and then we have to remain for what I suspect will be a few minutes just to deal with some motions that come out of the steering committee.

With us today from Ekos Research we have Mr. Frank Graves, who is the president, and Patrick Beauchamps, his associate. From Statistics Canada we have Mr. Bruce Petrie, who is the assistant chief statistician for social institutions and labour statistics, and Deborah Sunter, who is the assistant director of household surveys.

I see other people arranged around the room. Are these people here in case you get into trouble, so you can call in some expertise? You can introduce them as they are required.

Perhaps we'll start, Mr. Graves, with your presentation.

We'll take a few questions after Mr. Graves has outlined his presentation and then move on to hear from Statistics Canada. Then we can get everybody involved and see where we end up, right? If members have questions they want to ask, just indicate that to me and I'll start the list.

Mr. Graves.

Mr. Frank Graves (President, Ekos Research Associates Inc.): Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm going to talk a little bit about the somewhat spongier world of perceptions and attitudes and—

The Chairman: Excuse me, Mr. Graves. I just noted as you were speaking that the person with the overhead projector is here. Would you like to set up your slides?

Mr. Frank Graves: I think so. Then everybody could see. I'll start and maybe we'll catch up with the slides as we're going along.

The Chairman: Okay.

Mr. Frank Graves: For some time now, we've been examining, in some depth, Canadians' attitudes to the labour market, particularly to the role of governments, and how that's been changing and is driven by things such as their levels of insecurity about how they're going to fare in what's seen as a very rapidly changing and frightening world of work. So what I—

[Translation]

Mr. Paul Crête (Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup—Témiscouata—Les Basques, BQ): A point of order, Mr. Chairman. We do not have a French version of the brief to be presented this afternoon by Ekos Research Associates. I think it is essential that we have that document.

An hon. member: This is a bilingual country.

[English]

The Chairman: The policy of the House of Commons...this is not a member of the government. This is a private witness who apparently is allowed to present in whatever language he chooses. There is also a policy that we will translate documents. Did we not pass a motion to that effect?

The Clerk of the Committee:

[Technical Difficulty—Editor]

The Chairman: Okay.

[Translation]

Mr. Paul Crête: This is not a witness representing a community organization but rather a professional firm which has known for some time that this issue was to be studied by the committee. In my view, if we don't have any French document, we should not look at it today.

[English]

The Chairman: Mr. Crête, I appreciate what you're saying and I apologize for the fact that we're in this position. I have to ask you, however, what you would like to do at this point. Mr. Graves is here at our invitation. He's a guest here. He's not being paid to appear here. He's appearing here to share with us some of his research and expertise.

If you're saying you're unwilling to participate in the meeting at this point because of this, I feel very badly about it. I will give you my personal assurance that I will undertake to see, to the very best of our ability, that this never occurs again.

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[Translation]

Mr. Paul Crête: If there is no French version, we will simply leave the meeting.

[English]

Mrs. Brenda Chamberlain (Guelph—Wellington, Lib.): Mr. Chairman, just to clarify, there is French translation.

The Chairman: Yes.

Mrs. Brenda Chamberlain: It seems to me that it would be possible to carry on. If we don't want to follow a document, we certainly can talk in French and in English. I don't know why that would be any different from any other meeting.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett (St. Paul's, Lib.): Take the documents away from us.

Mrs. Brenda Chamberlain: Take the documents away and let us carry on verbally. That's fair.

[Translation]

Mr. Paul Crête: No, Mr. Chairman. Imagine if a francophone firm tabled a document only in French. You would have leaped up to express your indignation. We can't just go on being treated like second-class citizens. You will have to learn that there are two official languages in this country and this is not the way a committee should proceed when hearing a witness. These witnesses do not represent a community organization from Newfoundland. If that were the case, I could understand. But we have been talking about this study for three months and studying representations on the issue. You treat us as if we were second-class citizens. If you no longer want bilingualism, then say so officially and publicly, and we will live with that. This is unacceptable. I cannot put up with this.

[English]

Mrs. Brenda Chamberlain: Mr. Chairman, I still would propose that we take all the documents away and carry on with the meeting so that we can hear the witnesses, in French and in English.

[Translation]

Mr. Paul Crête: So go ahead on your own, build your own country! Go on and enjoy yourselves on your own!

[English]

Mrs. Brenda Chamberlain: In French and in English, sir.

[Translation]

Mr. Paul Crête: I'm going to leave. No, I won't allow myself to be insulted like that this morning. Your behaviour is unacceptable.

[English]

Mrs. Brenda Chamberlain: You were not insulted. I said “in French and in English”.

[Translation]

Mr. Paul Crête: You remind me of John Diefenbaker. You look a bit like him.

[English]

The Chairman: Okay. Mr. Crête?

[Translation]

Mr. Paul Crête: Good morning. I will remember this, I promise you that.

[English]

Mr. Robert D. Nault (Kenora—Rainy River, Lib.): Okay. Let's carry on here.

The Chairman: To our witnesses, I am sorry.

Mr. Frank Graves: I apologize. I did say in advance that I couldn't bring the translated materials on time. My colleague Mr. Beauchamps can answer questions in French. I am unfortunately unable to do so. We will try to provide the material in translated form as soon as possible.

The Chairman: Yes. And Mrs. Chamberlain is absolutely correct; there is simultaneous translation and it's quite common for witnesses to come here and deal in only one official language. That's why we have translation. The solution that Mrs. Chamberlain has proposed would normally be an acceptable one. I suspect there is something else occurring here that we're not completely apprised of, but I'm sure we will find out soon.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mr. Frank Graves: Nonetheless, I apologize for causing any problems.

The Chairman: So is it the will of the committee to proceed?

Mr. Dale Johnston (Wetaskiwin, Ref.): Certainly, Mr. Chairman. These people have made the effort to come here to be our witnesses.

We would also like to apologize to the witnesses for this disruption.

The Chairman: Mr. Nault.

Mr. Robert Nault: For the record, I think it's important that it is put on the record that it's not factually correct, as Mr. Crête suggests, that this has not happened in the reverse, on many occasions. Last year when we did significant studies relating to EI, there were many witnesses from Quebec who had nothing but presentations in French. And we didn't stop the meeting or have a hissy fit or act like a four-year-old. I get that at home once in a while, but I think my daughter is a little better behaved than he was this morning.

Quite frankly, it does happen in reverse, and that is why we have the instantaneous translation. It's unfortunate that people cannot understand that these things do happen.

And why do I put this on the record? Because I think it's important and I don't want to leave this little tirade unanswered before we carry on. Thank you.

The Chairman: Mrs. Chamberlain.

Mrs. Brenda Chamberlain: Mr. Chairman, I just want to thank Bob for verifying that, because there have indeed been a large number of meetings in which we have operated only in French if people have come here and that's the language they speak.

I think this is an issue of respect, and respect must flow both ways. When we do it and we have instances like this...we could have taken the documents away, which was a very real solution to this.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Mr. Graves, you may now proceed.

Mr. Robert Nault: You're not getting paid by the hour here.

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Mr. Frank Graves: I'm not getting paid at all.

I'd like to talk a little bit about what Canadians' priorities are with respect to issues around labour markets and others, how those compare with other priorities, particularly with what they're expecting from governments, and how satisfied they are with those things.

I'd like to talk a little bit after that about their competence and skill levels, and how that's divided in Canadian society, and the way in which insecurity plays out in what we're increasingly calling a “knowledge-based” economy. I'd like to speculate a little bit and provide some analysis on what might be some of the sources and drivers of insecurity in the labour market and how people see the roles of government and other players, both in the private sector and individual citizens themselves, in terms of their responsibilities for dealing with those problems.

The first slide looks at the priorities for the federal government. I want to point out that the priorities, if we ask this question, as we have, of provincial governments, look very similar. In fact, Canadians don't really disentangle very much the emphasis of things they want done for them from the federal and provincial governments. In fact, they would like both senior-level governments to cooperate to deal with these big-ticket items. The bigger the stakes, the more they want to see that level of cooperation.

You can see the list of concerns and priorities for the federal government. This is from a sample of 3,000 Canadian households, conducted and completed at the end of November of last year. It hasn't changed very much since then. It's dominated by what we call “human investment” themes—health care, education, jobs, and youth employment. The issue now is very much dominated by these human capital-type concerns, and it has been that case for some time.

If we were to look at the list through time, you would find that these things have remained at the top of Canadians' list, and actually have risen somewhat in terms of importance in recent years. Here I've tried to track, from the period of February 1994 up until October 1997, an illustrative demonstration of the level of priorities assigned to what we call “active” priorities, things like labour markets and health care, versus what you might call “fiscal” priorities, things like taxes and debt.

As this chart shows, at the top we have health care, unemployment and debt and deficit, all as basically tied concerns on the minds of Canadians in the period of February 1994. They all remain very high concerns up until about August 1995. At that point we start seeing that the debt concerns, which had been at the top, or tied at the top, of the list, had actually started to decline somewhat.

This was not because Canadians' fiscal resolve had declined. In fact, if anything, it was stronger. What had happened is that their level of alarm and anxieties about public finances had actually come down somewhat. Meanwhile, their concerns with some of the active investment areas around jobs and health care had actually remained high and started to go up even a little bit more.

If you look at concerns, for example, with the level of taxation over this period of time, you will notice that they were never at the same level of concern, the things everybody was bothered with, but they really didn't evoke the same level of crisis or concern in Canadians' minds as did things like the issues of health care and public finances.

They have progressively declined at each point since that period when we have asked this question the same way. We're seeing, then, a bit of a shift now, where as a consequence of the sense of relaxed fears about the state of public finances and a growing awareness of some of the damage, I guess, that people see as a consequence of retrenchment and so forth, which they agree had to happen but nonetheless see as causing some real problems and hard consequences in their communities, it has now produced a growing desire to say, okay, let's return to maybe doing some of those areas of collective action relating back to labour markets and health, for example. We've updated that as recently as January, and the patterns continue.

Let's look at the question of not just what are Canadians' priorities but also how satisfied they are with the way things are working in these areas of concern. The picture that comes back, looking at most of these areas, is what ranges from rather tepid marks in terms of the rating of the performance of the system to outright bad marks.

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It's interesting that health care, which we're not going to talk about today, was the one area, when we compared.... The bottom bars show the ratings in the period of 1995 and the top bars show the percentage who are satisfied with the system as of November 1998. You can see there's been a precipitous decline in satisfaction with health care.

However, look at the bottom of the list and the areas around labour markets, job creation, unemployment, job training, and even education, but particularly the areas of job creation, unemployment, and job training. Those areas have been top-level concerns, but only about one in five Canadians are actually satisfied with the performance of governments—and here it is governments, either provincial or federal—in terms of their ability to respond and manage some of the insecurities Canadians have or help generate some of the opportunities they see associated with this very different labour market out there today. There hasn't been much change in those things, actually, over this period of time.

I'm going to look now at the issue of competence and skills. Do people feel they have the knowledge, the technological literacy, and the basic human capital to negotiate their way through this new economy that everybody realizes and acknowledges is qualitatively different from the economy of a decade or two decades ago? You can see there is a fairly significant measure of confidence and optimism out there. Canadians in significant numbers, particularly recently, lean to a more optimistic view of the new knowledge-based economy. More people see that as providing opportunities than as providing risks.

That's not to say that this new confidence and optimism is not fairly fragile. It's not that deeply felt. One thing I'll show you later is that there's a fair bit of turbulence and movement around people's sense of insecurity, and that really, even though we see people moving in and out of a state of security about, for example, their prospects of keeping their job or their confidence in their ability to control their long-term economic future, the fact that we see so many people oscillating in and out of that state demonstrates that whatever confidence exists out there is not really foundationally strong for a large group of Canadians. In fact almost half of Canadian society feels some significant measure of insecurity about the labour market, particularly the longer-term labour market.

Here you see, for example, incidents of the number of people who say they have the skills necessary to move easily in today's labour market. Although 61% of Canadians agree with that proposition, still roughly 40% either feel indifferent about it or disagree. That becomes a key predictor of how confident you feel.

The next question measures people's perception of the shelf life of their skills—whether or not they think they're going to last into the longer term. You can see that about 30% agree outright that their skills will be obsolete in five years, and only about half of Canadians really feel they have a permanent skill base that's going to equip them for even the medium term. You go a little further and they get even more fearful.

So again, you're finding that roughly half of Canadians fit into this category of not really being that comfortable about where they're going to fit in the future. You can see the number grows somewhat as we expand the horizon from five years to ten years: we now have 35% who say they think their skills really will be obsolete.

That leads to a growing emphasis on things such as lifelong learning, the ability to reskill on an intermittent basis to deal with what's going to be seen not just as a single job that you attach yourself to early in your career and then stay with that employer for life, but as a series of intermittent positions that may well have very different types of skills and very different types of labour market settings, and you may in fact be the one operating as your own employer.

Those things are divided very strongly across social class lines. We find those people with low educational status and those people who have low income tend to feel these types of problems much more acutely than do those who come from the more affluent and comfortable portions of Canadian society.

There are also some regional divisions, although they are not, on this particular indicator, all that striking. For example, in some of them we find Quebeckers a little more comfortable in their skills than people in other places in the country. But the differences aren't that profound.

On the economic insecurity measures, which we're going to look at in a little more depth later, there are some fairly profound regional divisions. Basically, with the Ottawa River forming a divide, those who are east of it are feeling very anxious about their short- and longer-term economic prospects, and those on the other side are feeling pretty comfortable for the most part, at least in relative terms.

Here we see the question about technological confidence and employability. More and more people are seeing the labour market as being conditioned by their ability to use new types of technology. Information technology is rapidly becoming a pervasive feature of the labour market. We see the penetration of these kinds of new technologies as something that is going on at almost an exponential rate.

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For example, in our most recent survey on the information highway, we found that fully 37% of Canadians said that at work, at home, at school or at other places, they had been on the Internet, the information highway, in three past three months, which is up fairly significantly.

The Chairman: What percentage is that?

Mr. Frank Graves: It is 37%, a very large number. If you were to break that down by, say, people under 24, it rises to over 60%, compared with 7% of those over 60. If there is an acute generational divide in Canadian society, it's really on this issue of technology. It then feeds back to how labour markets are going to function, because a lot of those folks are using this.

One of the reasons you're seeing a lot of this growth, and not just in the use of the Internet, is that it's not seen so much as a toy as it is a serious tool—in fact, that's the dominant image—that is empowering in terms of self-employment or telework. It's seen as a new form of negotiating your way through the economy. That sense is much more strongly felt, and with much higher levels of competence and optimism, amongst younger Canadians than amongst older Canadians.

You see some of the breakdowns here. Competence in individual technological capabilities linking to employability is relatively high for males. It's higher in Ontario. It's very much linked with socio-economic status, education and income. Not surprisingly, on some of these measures we see some differences. Here we see youths surprisingly low on competence in this particular measure, but a lot of other measures will find they're relatively much more enthusiastic about the role of technology.

I want to look a little bit now at the issue of concerns about the longer-run job impacts of technology. As with any other fundamental shift in the economic order, as we move from industrial to post-industrial we find a large number of people are anxious about where they're going to fit into this new order. It's changing very rapidly.

We find here that substantial numbers fail to disagree with the proposition. It's not too hard to imagine my work could eventually be done by a computer or a machine. Those who are a little more familiar with the technology in this case are a little more likely to say, yes, I guess that's possible.

So technology, although it is producing overall a lean to a positive and optimistic view, is bringing with it a very serious residual package of concerns about things like job displacement, about machines doing a lot of the stuff that previously had been done by human beings.

You can see here that the concerns are strongest among some of the more vulnerable members of the labour market—women, those of lower income, lower educational attainment. Those who score lower on those technological literacy-type questions also express much higher levels of concern here.

The next slide I find fascinating. It's one of these things where we find a consensus amongst economists that the Rifkin scenario is ill founded and doesn't have any resemblance to what's actually happening in labour markets. We look at things like the employment rate and gross domestic product. It sort of flies in the face of the thesis Jeremy Rifkin is espousing. If you look at this indicator, it shows why Mr. Rifkin's lectures are so well attended. Notwithstanding what economists tell us, and the GDP being up, Canadians are really down on some of these issues about the longer-term consequences of this new transition in terms of its impact on permanent jobs.

So that future-of-work thesis, the apocalyptic end-of-work thesis, is actually something that is scoring a lot of points with a lot of people in Canadian society. What's perhaps even more disturbing is that last spring, the percentage of people who said it's very likely there will be a very serious and permanent shortage of jobs in the future was 24%. Last fall, it actually went up to 42%, notwithstanding the fact that labour markets were supposed to be doing better, the GDP was doing better, and public finances were better.

So there's this broad-based set of anxieties. Even though we're seeing some improvements in the short term, as people look further into the future, they wonder if there really is going to be a job there for them. This image of a jobless future is something that is really disturbing a lot of Canadians.

Again, it is very split along the same kinds of lines of those who are vulnerable and those who aren't, which we were talking about before.

What's less obvious about this is that when we turn to Canadians, after asking this sort of question, and ask who should be responsible for managing this transition to this frightening new world where there aren't going to be jobs for people, over half of Canadians pick, in a forced choice, the federal government, because they have the view from the bridge. Even though they're not going to be responsible for creating jobs and even though they can't do all the things they said they were going to do in the past, this is an area where we're holding them accountable for trying to provide some kind of an orderly plan, a blueprint, for a transition from this old type of economy to this new type of economy.

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The next most popular choice is provincial governments, but we go from about 50% to 16%. Then, surprisingly, when you move down to that being the responsibility of the private sector, the responsibility of individuals themselves, they are very small numbers. The idea of the planning function, of someone setting up a road map to move from here to there, is still something they would like to see the senior level of government providing. It's something that, by the way, they're not convinced—although the marks are mixed on this—is happening at this stage.

This is a bizarre chart. This question asks to agree or disagree with a rather stark proposition: I feel I've lost all control of my economic future. It's somewhat depressing to note that off and on we find something between 30% and 50% of Canadians agreeing with that proposition. Only about 20% to 30% feel comfortable that they can disagree with the proposition, that they haven't lost all control of their economic future.

Although we have seen some improvements—in other words, a steady decline—this again measures the percentage agreeing from early in 1994 to early in 1998. You can see that it is actually fluctuating fairly significantly. This issue of concern about losing control of one's economic future is not just driven by concerns about immediate job loss; it's also driven by broader concerns about, for example, the state of public finances, what's happening to our dollar, what's happening in terms of international trends and globalization. Also, less obviously, one of the key predictors, which I'll talk about a little bit later, is a sense of cultural insecurity, a sense of how am I going to fit, what role am I going to play, am I going to have any comfortable niche in this world, which seems to be moving into place at a pace that's a little too rapid for me to feel comfortable?

You can see here that we find higher levels of broad-based economic insecurity in Quebec amongst lower-income, lower-educated people.

In this slide the oscillations are even wilder. If this were a polygraph the Canadian public were taking, you would have to say they were fibbing to us. When we asked them if they thought there was a good chance they could lose their job in the next couple of years, we were seeing that notwithstanding.... In this period, again from 1994 until last November, it went up steadily. The GDP is improving, everything is getting better, the economy is recovering. Meanwhile, the percentage who say they are worried they will lose their jobs is going up steadily. If the GDP is up, why are Canadians down? There's a large tendency to discount—particularly in our qualitative research—a lot of the objective measures of economic performance. People feel those don't relate to them—their wages are stagnant, they've lost their job, their community doesn't seem to be rebounding. There's a real dismissal and a decoupling of the notion that economic growth necessarily means job growth or personal well-being. People are seeing things like large corporate profits, executive compensation, downsizing, all reinforcing these images that the growing economy doesn't necessarily mean personal well-being.

There was a fairly steep decline in the incidence of people who said they fear they could lose their jobs, and it was followed by another decline that looked like finally Canadians were starting to respond to the fact that labour markets were starting to perform better. Then, in November 1997, we saw things go way up again. Perhaps it was influenced by things like the Asian meltdown. It came down again in January 1998.

Whatever the reasons, the point is that whatever security exists is not really that stable; it's very superficial, very fragile, for at least 50% of Canadians. Again, we see the same patterns, with very strong divisions regionally, the Ottawa River being the divide: those east feeling much more likely that they could lose their jobs; those in the west feeling considerably more comfortable; and the usual relationships between those with lower incomes and lower educational attainments.

I don't want to pretend by saying that those fears exist. What's interesting is that some of these anxieties co-exist with a fair level of optimism. People are not just sitting in their rooms in a funk, saying, oh God, I'm going to lose my job. They're also thinking that there are more overall reasons to feel optimistic about the future than to feel pessimistic, although again you find this is split fairly much along income lines and educational lines. But there is a lean toward feeling more optimistic, and one of the things we have to understand is that we can have the co-existence of some optimism with still a fair level of wariness about where the long-term prospects in the labour market are going.

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I just want to conclude by offering a few results of the some of the analyses we've been doing of what actually seem to be the drivers; what factors, when you try to analyse and control for the influence of different things, consistently seem to be producing this sense of insecurity, this sense of anxiety.

One of the most surprising things we find when we do statistical modelling to try to show what things are related in the most consistent fashion with the folks who are feeling insecure is that it isn't just concerns about labour markets, it isn't just their human capital status; the most important predictors were things related to what we call cultural insecurity. People who felt, for example, that the world was changing too fast, that old Canada was passing away, people who felt nostalgic, regretful, who felt that we had lost a more prosperous, less fractious...that our decency and community values were eroding—those things that don't intuitively seem to be that directly related to the issues of the economy were in fact the strongest predictors of those who also felt a sense that they'd lost control of their future.

So those two are intertwined, and I really think that's an important point. It isn't just a rational calculus; there's a sense of values. Where do I fit? How am I going to be regarded? What kind of role will I play in the future? These things are key drivers.

The other thing we saw was the importance of technological change. People see it. It's no longer a story; people acknowledge it as a reality. They see it as producing a balance of optimistic and pessimistic things—more on the optimistic side, but they also have some serious concerns, particularly some of those groups who feel they're not that well poised to participate in that new knowledge-based economy.

They also feel that their skills and knowledge are relatively ephemeral. Certainly a large segment of the Canadian society says “Those things aren't going to last that long and I don't even think they're adequate right now.” That links to a desire for some help in terms of access to training, access to skill improvement, education. These are extremely resonant, extremely important to a lot of Canadians. In fact, they've displaced some of the traditional demand for measures such as job creation. Canadians are saying now, “Provide me with an active springboard. Give me the tools that can help me. Don't cut me loose, don't do everything for me, but help me out in the form of, for example, pointing out and helping me get the skills I need.”

Perhaps it also spills over to things such as self-employment, which is an extremely resonant alternative for Canadians, particularly for young Canadians. It gives them a sense of empowerment and it's linked again to things like social class. We find that Canadians are very concerned about what we would depict as levels of polarization, but what they call the growing gap between rich and poor. About 80% of Canadians say they're really alarmed about that and that they feel we are becoming more Americanized and more divided.

Again, just to summarize the most important factors in the various types of analysis that we did, we found cultural insecurity as a key predictor, something that wasn't obvious. There was also human capital, both in terms of actual hard educational attainment and competence and skills as well. We found that gender was related; women were more insecure than males.

There were a couple of less obvious ones, such as political literacy. Those who felt more fluent in how government worked, independent of other factors, felt more confident about how they would fare in the labour markets in the future, perhaps feeling that they could negotiate their way through this maze with the assistance of government to some extent. We found that confidence in government performance...those people who felt governments had a positive impact in their lives and were there for the good rather than for the bad were also more likely to feel a little more comfortable about how they could fare in the economies of the future.

These effects, by the way, are independent of the usual effects of education, social class and so forth.

I think that's an interesting linkage, which I think again underlines the fact that despite the fact that Canadians are saying, yes, I know jobs are created in the private sector, they are holding governments accountable for at least being one of the strategic partners in helping them, together, manage opportunities, manage insecurities, and reap some of the opportunities they see occurring.

Are there any concluding points? Is that enough? I think that's probably enough. I can certainly give you some information if you have any questions. I'd like to leave some time for my colleagues here. Thank you very much.

The Chairman: I have a few questions. I think we'll have questions for clarification at this point, and then we'll do the Statistics Canada presentation and then come back to both.

Mrs. Ablonczy.

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Mrs. Diane Ablonczy (Calgary—Nose Hill, Ref.): I have a question about your slides. They are not numbered, but one was on the Rifkin scenario. What is your understanding of the Rifkin scenario, that there would be a very serious and permanent job shortage? He calls it the death of work. What do you understand him to mean by that?

Mr. Frank Graves: I guess it varies along a continuum. Mr. Rifkin has one of the more extreme versions. You can divide those who look at the future of work into those who are relatively optimistic and think this is going to be a wonderful transition to new types of jobs, better economies, better labour markets, and those who see this as a step backwards in its impact on jobs. Mr. Rifkin is very much on the more apocalyptic, negative side of that equation, although not entirely. He tends to see the impacts of technology as destroying jobs, as producing what he calls literally the end of work. Not necessarily for all, but for a very sizeable proportion of the public, he doesn't feel there will be any jobs.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: That's what I understood too. I'm just a little puzzled about why you would say this aspect of the survey would be referable to the Rifkin scenario. The question isn't at all addressing the Rifkin scenario, which is do you think work as we know it will cease? The question is, do you think there's going to be a permanent and serious job shortage—which is not the Rifkin scenario as I understand it or as you've described it. I think it's a leap to say this validates people buying into the Rifkin scenario, isn't it?

Mr. Frank Graves: I don't think Mr. Rifkin, even though he has a fairly gloomy picture of the future, says there's literally going to be an end to work. He says that in fact those people who work in what Robert Reich calls the symbolic analyst class are going to do very well. There will be continued growth and good economic prospects for them. What he's saying is that a percentage of low-skilled jobs that previously existed in North America, for example, the western economies, is going to disappear.

He's not saying work per se is going to disappear. That would be a misreading of his predictions. I think he basically does say there will be a serious and permanent shortage of jobs—which is really the question we looked at. I wouldn't pretend that's a perfect operationalization of his hypothesis, but I think it is basically looking at the idea he has.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: It just seems to me that when we have a society that's had 10% unemployment, plus or minus, for decades, an answer to this likelihood of a permanent job shortage could be based on nothing more than a recognition that there has been a permanent job shortage, or a pretty permanent one, and that it is serious. To extrapolate that and say somehow Canadians are apprehensive to the degree Rifkin is is probably not something we would want to take out of the study, would we?

Mr. Frank Graves: We do bring them in and actually discuss these things in groups. I would say for a very large number of Canadians...and by the way, when they say there will be a permanent and serious shortage of jobs, they don't necessarily mean they won't have anything to do. They do think there may be other alternatives to work, and that isn't covered in this question. Even Rifkin himself, for example, puts a fair bit of emphasis on alternatives such as the use of the third sector or the voluntary sector, perhaps in a somewhat different form, as a way of filling some of the void he feels is going to happen.

But no, I don't think it would be an unfair statement—particularly when you couple it with measures such as finding that, off and on, 50% of Canadians say they have lost all control of their economic future—to say there is a very sizeable fraction of Canadians who really buy into, to some extent, the notion that the future of work isn't necessarily clear or such that there may not be a place for them in it. They may not feel this as intensely as Jeremy Rifkin, but a very sizeable number feel it perhaps much more acutely than, for example, do the economists who comment on the current status of the labour market or some of the policy makers. I think it's important to keep in mind that whether their fears are exaggerated or not, it's more than just saying we know unemployment has been at 10%. In the groups there are clearly deeper fears than that.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: This information before us is based on the survey, right, not on focus groups?

Mr. Frank Graves: Yes. My colleague Patrick Beauchamps has actually done an awful lot of these qualitative focus groups, talking with Canadians all over the country about these very topics. Perhaps he could add some sort of comment on what levels of fear or anxiety about the future exist. He's actually done about 100 of these over the last couple of years.

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Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: That would be interesting, but first, you refer to people saying they've lost control over their economic future. That could simply be the fact that no matter how much you try to put away or how much you try to manage your finances, the tax burden keeps rising. There are different economic factors at work.

So to say that we could conclusively draw the inference or the conclusion that somehow people are afraid that work is going to disappear, I'm not sure I could accept, based on what you've told me so far—unless there's something more.

Mr. Patrick Beauchamps (Director, Qualitative Research, Ekos Research Associates Inc.): If I may, there are two things I can say, having actually talked to these people, including those who've responded to our surveys on the telephone.

First, when people talk about their concern, it's a pretty visceral concern for a lot of people. It's not just worrying that maybe they're not going to be able to take a trip, or something like that. For a large proportion of people, it's about survival.

As well, the other thing I can say about the shortage of jobs is that, certainly over the last few years, people have thought, well, we have a high unemployment rate and certainly this should be able to be brought down. Maybe what you're seeing is that people are starting to wonder whether or not you can actually do something about this, and this is their cause for concern.

The Chairman: Mrs. Ablonczy, I have about four people on the list. I'd like to get the other presentation on the table, and then we can come back to this discussion.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: I think that's fair. No problem.

The Chairman: Mr. Wilfert.

Mr. Bryon Wilfert (Oak Ridges, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'm not sure I'm not getting mixed messages from what you've presented. In your chart on economic optimism, in pretty well all age groups and education and income levels, people seem to be pretty optimistic about the future down the road. Your comment didn't match the chart, in my view, in terms of what you said about people losing their economic control.

In the chart 50% didn't agree and 34% agreed, yet there were some fluctuations. You mentioned the Asian market situation. We can't establish a trend here, I presume, although there seemed to be a trend beforehand that people were starting to feel better about themselves. Whether the Asian market issue was a blip or not, clearly that would tie in with their economic optimism if in fact the rates have been generally higher in terms of the overall feeling that they can control their own lives.

At the same time, you talk about the federal government playing a stronger role, particularly in skills development, which I think has been acknowledged by the government. The question I have is, did they indicate what they thought the federal government could do?

Mr. Frank Graves: Let me deal with the first part. For those of us who study public opinion and public attitudes, we have to deal with the reality that the public can simultaneously hold a range of apparently contradictory opinions. You have to try to figure out how those are playing out, and how they balance.

The best I can figure out is that optimism coexists with large levels of trepidation and anxiety. In fact, some people will slip back and forth between feeling optimistic and feeling anxious from week to week, perhaps even from day to day.

I think there are a couple of points we should keep in mind. A solid core of Canadians—at the minimum, one-third—feel very insecure most of the time about their short- and long-term prospects in the labour market. Probably another 15% to 20%, say, gets us up into the neighbourhood of 50% to 60% who can fall into the category of feeling insecure and anxious. It isn't just about labour markets; it's also about some of the broader issues we've talked about. So only a third, roughly, of Canadians are feeling fundamentally confident and buoyant and happy about their position.

Now, I would say the overall trends in the last few years have been moving back to a little bit more of an optimistic point of view, but it's by no means.... Let me put it this way: the level of confidence Canadians feel is probably not as strong or buoyant as you would guess from reading, for example, what economists and brokers are saying and so forth. So in terms of what's going on, there's a gap between Main Street and Bay Street.

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On the issue of what Canadians expect governments to do, there really are some distinct points of view emerging. They no longer want a kind of heavy-handed, parental model of government, where governments are going to create all the jobs and fix them up with all the skills.

What they're looking for, more and more, is a partnership type of arrangement. That phrase perhaps sounds hackneyed to us because we hear it all the time, but it's very resonant with the public. They believe we need to have a diffusion of responsibilities; they don't believe that there's one magic bullet or one shoe that will fit every foot.

They'd like to see a mixture of different types of strategies. For example, they believe fairly strongly that you must have the macroeconomic fundamentals in place and our public finances in order, those types of things. That's a given, but they don't see that as producing growth or jobs in and of itself. They see it as a necessary—not a sufficient—condition.

When they move on today, I think they put a heavier accent—much more so than in the past—on what we would call “active tools”, which are things like helping them get some skills and upgrading their learning on a regular basis, but also things like micro-entrepreneurial activity, self-employment and relocation, if they want to do that.

People are saying to go to the active approaches first. They are not discounting the fact that we're going to need passive approaches to deal with what people recognize is some collateral damage in this new economy, like, for example, older workers who are not going to come back into the labour market and young, poorly skilled people who are really going to have a tough time getting in. They are not saying we can't use things like traditional passive income support to deal with those people, but today there is an overwhelming preference to go first to these springboard types of approaches, and if those fail, they say they'll look at the other things.

I think there some consistent messages. We have sat them down and given them chips and asked them to allocate 100 chips across the various strategies that are open to government, including things like the old job creation strategy, or training or reducing the debt.

It's surprising. When they're given the time to think and reflect on this in groups, they actually come up with a model quite similar to the kinds of solutions governments are coming up with. They actually feel more comfortable about it, having gone through the exercise. One of the problems, they say, is that they don't hear enough. They don't disagree with the plans the government has, but they just don't hear enough about them. They say they don't see them visibly expressed around them enough, in their lives.

Mr. Bryon Wilfert: I certainly would like, at some point, to get more information about the variable dealing with cultural insecurity. I found that most interesting.

Mr. Frank Graves: Yes.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Wilfert.

Mr. Johnston.

Mr. Dale Johnston: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm not sure how to identify this other than by name: federal involvement in skills and knowledge. You seem to have skipped over that page.

The Chairman: Maybe it was just so positive, Dale, that they thought it was self-evident.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: It's the last two or three slides.

Mr. Dale Johnston: It says, “Overall in the area of skills and knowledge, what would you like the government to do in the future?” Fifty-nine per cent said they would like the federal government to increase their involvement. In what in particular? In training?

Mr. Frank Graves: Yes, that's one example, but skills and knowledge would also apply to education, so people would link education and training as elements of both skills and knowledge.

Mr. Dale Johnston: Is this exactly the way the question was worded?

Mr. Frank Graves: That's exactly the way the question was worded. It gives them the options of saying it should increase, reduce, maintain or eliminate.

There are a couple of points—which I didn't have time to present—that I think you should bear in mind if you want some clarification in order to be able to interpret this question properly.

If I ask this randomly and to some respondents say “federal government” and to others “provincial governments”, I basically get exactly the same response. Only 3% of Canadians are saying, for example, why don't you eliminate your role in helping us find those skills? They are not saying to do it all, but there are very few buying into the idea...they want at least some help. They want to hedge their bets and they want both the provincial and the federal governments involved here.

That's true of a lot of areas, by the way. The public rejects a lot of the watertight theory of government, that idea of saying you'll do this thing and you'll do that thing. They say, we don't really trust either of you buggers.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mr. Frank Graves: They say they want to hedge their bets. They say that maybe they can naively seeing you splitting up this pie so that there are some complementarities: maybe one knows more about it at the regional level and the other knows more about the way the labour market performs. They say to try some different things, but they also want a view from the bridge, and they want some sense that there's going to be common treatment throughout the country.

There really are fairly strong preferences throughout every place in Canada for some kind of equal partnership. The lean to whether federal or provincial should take the lead or a junior role varies according to where you are: Quebeckers will lean a little more to a junior role; British Columbians lean a little more to a junior role. But overall, everywhere the most popular choice is, let's have respectful partner-equals cooperating to help citizens themselves. There's a real fatigue with a lot of what's seen as territorial squabbling. People say, look, stop bickering and get on with helping us deal with these really big problems we have.

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Mr. Dale Johnston: It would be interesting to ask whether people consider that the government can react quickly enough or if they are continually trying to play catch-up with the marketplace; if the government ever does get out ahead of the market and is in a position where they can predict what is going to be needed in the way of goods, services, products, and that sort of thing.

Mr. Frank Graves: I have some information on that—not in this package, but we have asked people how well they feel governments are poised to deliver things such as labour market forecasts, labour market information, about what jobs will be in demand, and how satisfied they are with the existing stuff that's out there. The marks would be described as mixed. I think very few people out there are putting all their eggs in “let's get government to solve my problems in the labour market”. They are also saying that they certainly want that kind of information, that kind of looking forward. They don't think it's coming elsewhere, and even though they say it's not perfect, they would rather have that than nothing. They would like government to improve its performance in some of those areas, providing them with strategic intelligence, for example, about what jobs will exist, what skills they will need, and how they get those.

Mr. Dale Johnston: You have probably done work on this—I know it shows here in the last few months—but in the last few years has the confidence of people grown or lessened?

Mr. Frank Graves: In government's ability?

Mr. Dale Johnston: Yes.

Mr. Frank Graves: It is interesting. There has actually been a slight recovery. There are still large levels of cynicism and skepticism about government, the value for money it generates, and its performance. It's another one of these apparent anomalies. Notwithstanding the fact that Canadians say governments don't perform—as you saw, the ratings in terms of performance in areas of labour markets were pretty negative—they still say they don't want it to go away; they want it to improve its performance.

Over the last three or four years, the trends have been decidedly in favour of inviting government back in a little bit to help us out with some of these things. There are some very strong provisos and conditions on that invitation, but Canadians are saying, yes, with the proviso that it's done in partnership, that you actually show us what the blueprint is, that you set up some targets. These kinds of things underlie a desire to see government returning.

By the way, that's linked to a declining trust in recent years with the private sector, at least big business. Even though people have been mad at both governments and big business, there's been a little more anger registered in terms of directions in the last few years against big business, perhaps again related to things like downsizing in years of high corporate profit, bank presidents' salaries—all these things have become irritants. The overall view is that both the marketplace and the state are exerting a corrosive influence on Canadian society, but the lean is to return to allowing governments to play a little bit more of a role in our lives.

Mr. Dale Johnston: Just one final brief comment. It's very interesting to note on the priorities for the federal government how close all those top seven or eight things are, right down to managing our natural resources, as far as people rating them as priorities. I think the bar graph actually shows more accurately how close it is than the other graph. The other graph looks more dramatic. When you really look at people's concern about the level of taxation, for instance, it has only gone down about 17%. I think it's worth everyone noting what people's priorities are.

Mr. Frank Graves: By the way, when I say that the concern with the level of taxation is lower than these other concerns, I'm not saying it's not an issue. Most Canadians will tell you their taxes are too high and they deserve a tax cut. It's when they compare them today against some of the other priorities. They say maybe we have to do something about the debt, or maybe we have to do something about some of these people who have been hurt, or maybe they need some help with education. Those things trade off a little differently.

The Chairman: Thank you. Of course, these samples were taken before Tuesday's historic budget.

Mr. Frank Graves: I'm sure.

The Chairman: Mr. Nault.

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Mr. Robert Nault: I'm under the impression that insecurity has been with us for a long time, especially young people. I'm not old enough now to have forgotten my insecurity when I was in university or just starting my work life.

Have you tracked this for a number of years, or have companies like yours tracked it longer than just, say, through the difficult 1980s? Did we start doing this in the 1960s, and can we see where we're really going? I get the impression that this is not much different from how it used to be for certain groups.

We may have a little bit more insecurity in the middle class because of the fact that the middle class thought the government and the country was not being managed properly and was out of control. When I look at your graph, there's a dramatic drop where it says, “I feel I've lost control over my economic future.” It just takes a plunge in January 1998. Is that an indication that people are now starting to see that the governments have gotten their act together, and that's the middle class?

I don't think the poor and the youth are ever going to change as it relates to their insecurity. That's based on education, that's based on the lack of a good job, and for young people, that's based on hormones, and I don't think you're going to change that, no matter how hard you try as a government.

Can you give me a sense of the longer-term trend?

Mr. Frank Graves: Yes.

By the way, people are acknowledging for the first time the fact that public finances aren't going to hell in a hand-basket and that we're not plunging into fiscal oblivion. They're not saying they're going to applaud for that, but thank God, at least the IMF isn't going to come in and shut us down next month. That's finally registered—it took a long time—and that is producing some of the thaw we're seeing in people's attitudes as to whether or not government can do things. It is linked to a little bit of a resuscitation of a desire to deal with others.

The public are pretty convinced that things today are worse than they were in the past. Whether or not that's actually the case, we find that a large number of Canadians say things have gotten much worse. There are more poor people today than there were two years ago or five years ago, according to most Canadians. They think the economic situations today are worse than they were in the past.

We do find some differences. There are comparable measures that were asked in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Although insecurity has always been a feature of our society, certainly in the last half of this century, there's a case to be made that it's higher and not as directly linked to things such as the economic indicators, particularly some of the macroeconomic indicators, as it used to be in the past.

For example, there are more young people today who think they will actually not be better off than their parents. In the previous generation, my generation, when you asked those questions, an overwhelming majority of young people said, “I'm going to actually do better than my parents”. Today young people say, “I might do as well, but I'm not going to do better”.

The overall levels of anxiety are higher today than they were in the past, although there were certainly significant levels of anxiety and insecurity in the past. The sense that there's this unprecedented period of prosperity and growth before us, which was really held by very many Canadians and North Americans following the expansionary period in the post-Second World War and which underlay a lot of the growth of a lot of the social programs in government and so forth, really retracted a lot over the 1980s and the first half of this decade. Certainly we haven't gone back yet to the period of buoyancy, optimism, and confidence that existed, say, in the 1960s and 1970s. Whether we'll ever get there is another question.

So there are some qualitatively different aspects, although there are some parts of this that are just common features of the levels of anxiety that have existed for some time.

Mr. Robert Nault: On the issue of fear of job loss, you mentioned in your side bar that it's higher among Quebec, Atlantic, less educated, lower income. How pronounced is that difference once we go to the east of the Ottawa River? That's important to know, because there's a perception that it's all of Canada that has that tremendous anxiety, but when you go into Ontario and you go west, you don't get that same sense of insecurity.

I come from the last riding in Ontario, which is very western-oriented, and people have very much of a heartier kind of attitude: “I can do it on my own and I can make this work” and “We'll get things done here”. I just wanted to know how pronounced that difference is. Is it really high and then it drops off as you go west?

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Mr. Frank Graves: It's pretty pronounced. It's probably not far off the ratios you'd see with the unemployment rates, although it's probably even broader. It's magnified in the perception of the public, but yes, there would be highly significant differences in terms of those who say they fear they will lose their jobs in the eastern part of Canada.

Ontarians are quite optimistic. In fact, Ontarians, along with Albertans, are the most optimistic in Canada today. British Columbians, who were extremely competent and buoyant for a long time while the rest of the country was down, are now feeling higher levels of insecurity and anxiety than they have been. They're still feeling relatively optimistic, but they don't have that edge, that advantage, they had while the rest of the country was struggling. In fact, now you're seeing that moving into Alberta and Ontario; they're feeling very confident.

The overall direction, as you point out, is toward feeling a little better, a little more confident, and optimism outweighs pessimism in today's labour market. It's just that there are some significant pockets of folks who—

Mr. Robert Nault: The last thing I want to tie into that question is, why is it then in the priorities for the federal government that there's no emphasis on regional development? If that is the case in regions like Quebec and Atlantic Canada, why is it not showing up as a priority for those regions in a large way? If you have higher anxiety, you would think there would be more emphasis on regional development kind of solutions to their particular problems.

Mr. Frank Graves: That's a good question.

I didn't show you the chart, but this is one thing we have tracked where we've seen some highly significant changes in a short period of time. We found that the percentage of Canadians who endorse regional wealth redistribution has declined fairly sharply in recent years.

It wasn't really at the top of the list, but part of the political economic rationale in Canada was that we would shuffle transfer payments around a bit to buffer out and develop some of the softer parts of economies and deal with the fact that some regional economies have some distress during some periods. What we've really seen in the last several years is that the support for that model is really declining fairly significantly.

It's also linked to a decline in support for not just regional transfers but individual wealth transfers. It's not so much a resistance to people paying for others or a real hardening of Canadians' compassionate arteries as much as a sense that they're not sure that stuff worked. A lot of Canadians will say that had the ironic implication of perpetuating the very problems it was supposed to solve.

So the thesis that these sorts of things have encouraged dependency, either in individuals or regions, is something you'll hear expressed a lot more commonly today than in the past. People will again say maybe we need to try some different measures. That may be why some of the support for some aspects of regional development has been in decline, because people have associated that with the old wealth redistribution model and they are not all that convinced that that's a good solution.

Mr. Robert Nault: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Nault.

Mrs. Brown, before you begin, I note that we have consumed an hour, although we were a little slow getting off the mark, for some apparent reasons.

Perhaps, Mr. Graves, we could be more concise in our responses, so we can get the Stats Canada presentation on the table here.

I know you are always concise, Mrs. Brown.

Ms. Bonnie Brown (Oakville, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm not known for it, so you're wise to warn me.

What I will do is ask the three questions together and then Mr. Graves can answer.

I'm grateful to have two surveys juxtaposed on some of these charts, showing a difference over time, but I would like to know about the two entitled “Information Highway Survey, October 1997” and “Rethinking Government, January 1997”. Were these two surveys that your firm did for two different customers or clients? On the information highway survey, because it's called that, I don't know if the client was called something like that or whether in fact you did the survey on the Internet and the respondents were all users and therefore technologically literate.

That's the first question. One of the reasons I ask that question is because throughout this I feel a certain dichotomy between two things, and that is that the worry about job displacement is rather high among youth, which may be attributable to hormones, as my colleague has posed, but I find it very odd, considering that the youth also demonstrate the highest level of technological ease. Therefore, it would seem to me that as we enter the knowledge-based economy, they should be the most optimistic about their chances of hanging on to a job.

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The real question is, faced with that dichotomy, might it be that young people, who have already experienced the need for developing new skills to keep up with the changes—new software, new hardware, new this, new that—realize that so many changes are going to be required within the workforce that nobody is really secure? In other words, might young people know more about this than some of the people who are optimistic but essentially optimistically ignorant of what the real changes are going to be?

My third question relates to charts 1 and 2, addressing economic insecurity. I find this tremendous jump in November 1997 unexplainable. I've been racking my brains trying to remember what happened in November, and then what happened in January to cause the insecurity level to fall.

You suggested it might have been the Asian meltdown. Given the level of economic literacy in the country, I find it hard to believe that average people answering questions are going to say, “Gosh, I'd better bury my money in the backyard”, because something went wrong in Singapore. I can't see them making that connection. I think it's more things in their own lives. There weren't big lay-offs in November 1997.

In digging under that question, then, do you have any other information?

Mr. Frank Graves: I'll try to deal quickly with the three questions.

First of all, in terms of comparing the two surveys, one on rethinking government and the other on the information highway, the differences aren't due to differences in methodology. They used the same probability sampling of the general public by telephone, and they asked the questions in the same way. They're both sponsored by a consortium of partners. For the information highway survey it was private and public sector partners, and for the other it was a number governments, at both levels. So the differences, I think, are real.

In terms of the second issue, and whether youth are more conversant about technology, absolutely. Do they therefore have a higher awareness of both the upside and downside of technology? Yes, I think that is the case. We see that in some of the groups.

It's important to remember that the youth labour market is not homogeneous. It's very much divided into a highly qualified portion—they're doing as well or better than their parents, although they're having a few problems in terms of delayed entry—and a portion that doesn't have good skills. In fact, poorly skilled young males have really been doing very badly, falling far behind.

So part of the problems we see here may be because of segmentations in the youth labour market, but I think part of what you say is indeed true.

There's also the fact that in the groups we've done, young people distinguish between a traditional job and their economic survival in this new economy through things like much higher emphasis on intermittent, part-time contracts, self-employment and so forth. So part of the differences in reactions may be that they're talking about not so much will they be able to economically survive as will they be able to have a full-time job. That may explain some of the apparent differences.

On the third question about the fluctuations in insecurity levels, I don't think it is explained simply by people registering, for instance, “God, the Asian flu is going to cause my savings to go to hell”. Some of that stuff may have a ripple effect as it gets interpreted through the media, through others talking about it and bringing it back into the home, and those types of things. Even though they're not directly aware of it, then, it may have a kind of contagion effect and influence things that way.

To me, though, the more important point is not that it's going up and down but that there's a class of Canadians out there—say, 20% of that 30% to 50% who either fall in or out of that class of “I feel insecure”—who really don't feel that secure. Whatever the effect is, it can't be that profound if it's shifting you, on that kind of mercurial basis, back and forth from a state of security to insecurity. You can pretty well argue, with some confidence, that this security isn't very stable. It's a pretty fragile state of security when it exists.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Graves.

I have one very brief intervention from Madam Bradshaw.

Mrs. Claudette Bradshaw (Moncton, Lib.): He keeps telling me that, but I don't usually listen.

What Rifkin was saying to me, if I understood him correctly, was that as politicians, it's very dangerous for us if we listen only to the academics and to those in business, corporate and high tech. He's saying to us, loud and clear, if you don't listen to the community people and if you don't build community, then it is going to be the end of work. That's what I understood from Rifkin.

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When I look and listen to a lot of presentations at this committee.... At the end of the day we have to make recommendations to the minister, so there are two things I have for you. First, when you do this, do you listen to the community people? Do you question the at-risk youth, the at-risk people who are in the job market but are not in the job market? Do you question the people who are on social assistance? They are the ones who are costing us, they are the ones we don't seem to bring into the market, and they are the ones Rifkin is talking to us about, I believe. How much of them is in our paper here?

That's my number one question. My number two is this. As a federal government, if we look back at when we started in the work market, there were a lot of jobs but there were also a lot of opportunities for us. What I'm hearing people in my community tell me is, the banks won't lend to me; if I'm not big I can't get a small loan. Is it a matter of our saying small businesses are going to create jobs but at the same time there's nothing in the system for opportunity? Am I reading that right?

Mr. Frank Graves: On the first question, the samples are probability samples. They are designed to reflect those members of society in the same proportions as they occur. For example, 10% are on unemployment insurance and our samples will have 10%, so in a sample of 3,000 we'll have 300 people—and so forth. Because these are based on large samples of a repeated nature, we have a fairly good representation of the various types of groups you've talked about.

In the qualitative focus group sessions we talked about, where we actually put 10 people in a room, the representation is even higher, because we specifically compose, for example, groups of at-risk youth and employment disadvantaged youth. We use, for example, people who say, I'm worried I'll lose my job, as one of the ways to screen. I have groups composed of those only, and they are overrepresented in the probing and questioning we do there. We have a pretty good understanding of how they compare and what they think about these sorts of issues.

That gets to your second question. Yes, there is certainly some sense that the labour markets are going to be very different. In the past the opportunities existed in some of the areas.

One of the areas I thought was really interesting—this may change—was that in the 20-odd groups we did with youth last year, about employment issues, almost nobody was raising the possibility of public sector careers. Even though it remains close to half the economy, there's a sense that there are just no jobs there whatsoever. Maybe that will change as public finances get better and we do more things—who knows?—but youth are not putting many eggs in that basket.

Rifkin, for example, talks about the need for priming and enhancing the voluntary, communitarian third sector. That is an option that is attractive, but not without some mixed responses. People say it's just going to be a form of discount government or a way of saving money or poorly skilled jobs, with poorly qualified people substituting for...and then they are worried. But generally, as one looks at the future of work, there is a high level of receptivity to the third sector as a way of accomplishing things you normally wouldn't get to—for example, environmental issues—and for giving either a bridge to the normal labour market or something relatively more permanent for those who aren't going to get into it.

On the issue of banks and self-employment and start-up loans and that, a lot of people are mad at the banks and they did say the things you are saying, but there's a lot of support for the idea of priming self-employment. In fact, it's more resonant amongst the public than the real opportunities are, but there is also quite a bit of opportunity for growing it beyond what we are currently doing. Things such as micro-credit, loans for self-employment, are pretty attractive.

The hard evaluation work on this, which we actually do when we wear another hat, is pretty positive. Self-employment does work reasonably well. It forestalls future draws on social accounts, reduces the likelihood of unemployment in the future, and people really like it.

One thing we've noticed lately is that we are seeing a fairly significant growth in the percentage of people who say they are working at home, teleworking and so forth. What is not as obvious is that despite the fact that some people claim that's unpaid overtime, it's destroying family life, when we ask those people, they say overwhelmingly, “I like it; it puts me in control of my future, it improves my family life, it improves my work, it improves my economic situation”. So I really think we have to be looking, particularly with technology increasing that option, more and more to that opportunity.

The Chairman: Ms. Chamberlain, we are far over time.

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Mrs. Brenda Chamberlain: I just wanted to ask what is the age of youth? What do you count as youth?

Mr. Frank Graves: We will use different cutoffs, but we will go for 30 and under and we'll also do it sometimes 24 and under. In some of our surveying we'll go right down to 14-year-olds, but typically it's from 16 to 30 or 16 to 24. I saw that one social service agency out east is actually now counting youth up to something like 39. I thought, “Keep going! I'm going to get back into the young category. Come on!”

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mrs. Brenda Chamberlain: I have three boys who would be in that category. It's odd; you said kids think they won't do as well as the parents, but you know, there's a second question in that. If you ask my kids now, at their age, they say that, but they also finish it with saying, “I don't want to”. That's an interesting part of that second question, because many of them are saying they don't want the new car or the big house. That very well may change with aging, but I'm just saying that is an interesting second part to that question you're asking, if you've never thought of it.

Mr. Dale Johnston: You must have a pretty big house.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mrs. Brenda Chamberlain: Oh, I do. We have a lot of kids.

The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Graves.

Mr. Frank Graves: Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Now we are going to move, dare I say, from the sizzle to the steak, from the ethereal to the nuts and bolts.

Mr. Petrie.

Mr. D. Bruce Petrie (Assistant Chief Statistician, Social, Institutions and Labour Statistics, Statistics Canada): As a word of introduction, Mr. Chairman, we've attempted to put together for you a package of information showing some of the overall trends in the labour force in employment, unemployment, and participation—the sorts of trends that underlie some of the changes in feelings, attitudes, and opinions that Frank has been talking about.

These are fairly familiar trends, but in putting forward these overall trends, we've tried to identify some of the underlying, not-so-well-reported changes, particularly in the nature of employment, which may be of interest to you.

The presentation will be given by my colleague Ms. Sunter, who is the manager of the monthly labour force survey, which is the source of the employment and unemployment figures you see each month.

[Translation]

If your questions are too difficult for us, two of our colleagues here will no doubt be able to help us. Deborah.

[English]

Ms. Deborah Sunter (Assistant Director, Household Surveys, Statistics Canada): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Of necessity and due to short time, I'm going to paint a fairly broad picture, a very macro picture with a broad brush. There are a lot more details behind many of these stories, and I'll try to allude to some of them as we get to them.

The first few charts just set up the context of the labour market in the recent past. The first chart depicts GDP and employment growth over the 1990s. As is well known, there's a close relationship. In 1994 GDP surged ahead, and employment followed suit. In 1997 we've certainly had strong growth in both output and employment.

Turning to the next chart, we can see that the distribution of this employment growth has certainly not been even amongst age and sex groups. As is well known by this committee, adult women have fared considerably better than youths and even better than adult men with their employment rate, which is the proportion of the population who have jobs. This is a useful measure because it controls for population change. The proportion of women in the age group of 25 to 54 hardly dipped in the recession and is now taking off to a peak level. That, for youths, fell very steeply during the recession and has failed to recover at all since then.

On the next chart, adult unemployment and youth unemployment, you can see that in unemployment rates, there's considerable divergence. It's a well-known pattern; youth unemployment has historically been higher than adult unemployment. One of the questions we're frequently asked, then, is should we worry about this? Is youth unemployment any higher, relative to adult unemployment, than usual?

The chart on the right-hand side is a ratio of youth unemployment divided by adult unemployment rates. About 20 years ago, certainly youth were much more likely to have a higher unemployment rate—more than double the unemployment rate of adults—but we should recall that at that time adult unemployment was extremely low and youths were trying to get into the labour market, and that always pushes up the rate. What is interesting in this chart is the upturn in the 1990s in the gap that has been growing between the youth unemployment rate and that of adults as the adult unemployment rate improves and the youth unemployment rate does not.

• 1225

One of the major trends talked about a lot—certainly it has been today—is growth in self-employment. Self-employment has been growing for some time. It has had a renaissance for about 20 years. However, we really haven't seen the kind of acceleration before that we've had in the 1990s. In fact, self-employment accounts for 80% of the increase in employment between 1989 and 1997. It is now 18% of all employment.

It's worth noting that with this surge in self-employment in the 1990s there has certainly been a change in the character of self-employment too. In the 1980s self-employment was also growing, but 60% of that growth was amongst those who employed other people, and therefore there were spin-offs for job creation. In the 1990s only 10% of the increase in self-employment has been amongst those who are employers themselves and create jobs for other people. So the character has changed.

We've tried to look at the quality of this work, and we don't see that it's hot dog stands. Certainly much of it is of the same occupational distribution, managerial and professional types of jobs—rather good jobs. But these people are generally working on their own.

In the next chart I turn to the leading industries in job growth over the 1990s. Not surprisingly, with self-employment growth, business services have led the way, with more than 300,000 more jobs over this period. All the net growth has been in services. There have been notable losers. Public administration is the most notable. Manufacturing and construction are still in a negative situation in terms of the number of people employed in the 1980s, but particularly manufacturing has been turning around very strongly and is almost back to its peak levels.

On the next chart we look at the occupational dimension of employment. It certainly confirms that of all the full-time job growth in the 1990s, professionals and managerials have accounted for virtually all of it. Those in clerical positions have actually declined quite considerably, and there has been only a small increase or decrease in the other occupations. This certainly supports the whole notion of jobs going to those with the highest skills.

On the next chart, about jobs going to knowledge workers, is a view of the path HRDC has put together, dividing occupational skills up into four groups. According to the data, knowledge workers have grown at at least double the pace of even data workers, and certainly at a great deal stronger a pace than those who transform materials into goods.

As we look into the future, the demand is expected to continue, not surprisingly, for knowledge workers. Here the view is in terms of educational attainment. It is expected that employment will increase at an average annual rate of 2.5% for those with university degrees, while falling every year for those without high school diplomas.

Another aspect of the labour market that is often talked about these days is trends in the participation rate. On the next chart I have a very broad-brush picture of participation rates. Certainly over the long term we know older men have been leaving the labour force in increasing numbers and bringing down their participation rates. Adult women have been increasing their participation. And youths, only recently, have certainly fallen out of the labour market.

• 1230

I bring this up because I want to focus on the recent decline in the participation rate and some of the possible explanatory factors behind it. I think we understand the long-term trend quite well, but there's certainly a lot of discussion about this. Labour force participation always drops in recession, but why has it not increased? And is all of this decline a signal that we have several hundred thousand discouraged workers out there?

The chart on page 11 shows you a decomposition of this recent decline in the participation rate. It's fallen a little less than 3%. If we hold population composition constant and look at who's accounting for that drop in participation rates, almost two-thirds is coming from youths, and almost another third from those who are 55 years of age and over. Only 10% comes from core-age working people.

Turning to the next chart, we see, not surprisingly, that a lot of the explanation for the fallen youth participation is rising school attendance. We've had a long-term trend. It's not been especially accelerated over the last few years, but it's certainly continuing. In 1997, 62% of young people were attending school, up from 50% seven years ago. That's a record proportion. And clearly, young people are much less likely to participate in the labour market, so that's putting a dampening effect on participation rates.

Turning to the other end of the age scale, those who are 55 years of age and over are also leaving the labour force. Why is that? Is it discouragement? Is it a lack of opportunity or what?

We certainly know that there's been a drop in the retirement age amongst Canadians. If we look at this chart, we can see that it doesn't really coincide with the notion of recession and poor job opportunities because it began in 1987 in a period of economic growth. Therefore, it probably has more to do with pension opportunities than with the labour market.

We do have some information on why people say they retire. On the next chart, we can see that if you look at those people who have retired in the 1983-88 period, a period of expansion, and compare their reasons to those of people who retired in the 1989-94 period, a period mostly marked by recession or very slow growth, the distribution of the reasons for retirement hasn't changed all that much, although it is worth noting that unemployment and early retirement packages have increased as a share of the reasons that people retire. But they are still quite a minority compared to all of the other reasons.

From the labour force survey, we do have a direct measure of labour market discouragement. If you look at youths and adults, it appears that it's very difficult to look at simply the drop in participation rates to account for discouragement. The direct measure is questions that ask people without jobs and without employment why they didn't look for work and if they wanted work. If they say they wanted work but they didn't look because they didn't believe they could find anything suitable, we classify them as discouraged, and in 1997 that was 110,000 people.

So it's very interesting, then, to think, if we added this on to a broader measure of unemployment what would our unemployment rate look like? On the next chart, you'll see that it's quite clear that it matters where you are with respect to what impact it has on the unemployment rate. At the national level the unemployment rate rises by about half a percentage point.

At this point I want to turn away a little from these more general macro indicators and get into more of the issues like volume of work, distribution of work and the quality of work, again admitting that this is really a thumbnail sketch. It takes a lot of time to develop the details.

• 1235

First of all, it's a well-known fact that part-time employment has been growing. It's been growing for some time. It notches up in recessions and it fails to recede during the expansion. So there's a step-like pattern, and the nineties have been no exception. We're in a kind of plateau of part-time at the moment. In 1997 about 19% or almost one in five people were in a part-time position. We define that as those whose usual work hours at their main job are less than 30.

One indicator of just how good or bad that distribution of work is, is whether or not people want to be part-time. It is worth knowing that two-thirds of part-timers want part-time work: it supports school, it supports child care activities, and other things. But over time we have a similar notching up of the proportion of all workers who were in part-time positions involuntarily. In 1995 that stood at about 6%.

The next chart talks about hours a little bit more generally. The distribution is not just going to the short end, as we know. There is a lot of talk about long-hours workers, and that's the clearly the case. Hours have polarized somewhat for workers. We have only about 57% of people working what we would normally call a standard work week—a 35- to 40-hour work week—and many more working at the other ends of the poles. One of the reasons why this kind of change in the distribution of hours becomes important is people wonder about the feasibility of redistributing those hours.

Turning to the next page, we have some indication that if you wanted to redistribute hours on a voluntary basis it might be rather difficult. Surprisingly, very few people want to lower their hours: 7% in total want to work fewer hours and 28% want to work more hours. The rest want to work the same hours.

I've divided the groups here into part-time and full-time, because clearly that would be important. One would expect full-timers to want to lose some of those hours, but not very many do; only one in ten. Some further studies StatsCan has conducted have looked at giving those hours over to people who need hours, but the mismatch between occupations and skills and experience is such that there isn't a large redistributive capacity there.

One other aspect about hours and work distribution is multiple job holding. Just how many people have more than one job? It's certainly a growing group. It's now about 600,000. It's up from 2% 20 years ago of all employed people to about 5% today. It has plateaued in the nineties, perhaps due to a lack of opportunity to add a second job. Anyway, it has certainly slowed down in terms of an increase.

But the characteristics of multiple job holders are really very different in the nineties from what they were in the seventies. In the seventies they were almost all male full-time workers in the goods sector, primarily with day jobs and working in the evening. In the nineties a multiple job holder is just as likely to be a woman and much more likely to be in the service sector. Many of them are putting part-time jobs together to get full-time hours.

Another aspect of job quality, of course, that we could all agree is very important is wages. Just how wages are distributed across groups is pretty important. Even if wages were growing and they weren't evenly distributed, it might add to a sense of insecurity and loss in the labour market.

The first chart is a picture of an indexed distribution of wages across age groups for women. So we're only comparing women to women and women through time in this chart. These wages have been adjusted for inflation.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: Could you describe that chart?

Mr. Robert Nault: What does 200 to 80 mean?

• 1240

Ms. Deborah Sunter: This is an index. What we really want to know is, relative to 1969, what has happened to the wages for different age groups. Relative to where that age group was in 1969, has it increased in real wages, or have their wages declined? Are there differences in those trends across age groups among women? The benchmark doesn't give you the dollar values. It's just relative trends.

Quite clearly there has been a fanning out of this distribution, or a growing gap, between the wages of young women and older women. Indeed, it's worth remarking on this chart, because we won't see it in the next chart, that for a considerable number of age groups of women wages have increased a lot compared with where they were 20 years ago.

If we turn to the next chart, it focuses on the same thing, comparing men's wages across age groups through time, adjusted for inflation. Again we see an important growing of the gap between the wages of young men and older men.

Another thing different from the women's graph, however, is a real flattening or stagnation of adult men's wages. It's not that adult men's wages are taking off and youth's are not. It's rather worse than that. Adult men's are staying the same and youth's are plunging.

These wages are calculated for all workers, whether or not they work full-time and the full year. They could be part-time, part of the year.

Certainly one of the underlying factors in these trends is hours of work. That's an important factor. Women are generally moving up in hours, with longer work weeks. Young men are finding it a little more difficult to get the hours. But for young men, wage rates are also declining. That would explain some of that gap.

One other important aspect of remuneration is not just wages but also the benefits you might receive from your work. We don't have trend information that would help me out here, to tell you whether things are getting worse or better, but I do have some information from a 1995 survey that suggests that those who have get more, not surprisingly. The higher up the hourly wage rate scale you go, the much more likely you are to receive all types of benefits, from paid vacation to pension plans.

The last section of this presentation focuses on the notion of job security. Something we've heard a lot about is people's perception of job security. If one looks at a study that can measure changes through time, we know there's an enormous amount of flux in and out of jobs. Longitudinal survey tells us that in 1994, over the entire year, 36% of workers made an entrance into, made an exit out of, or changed jobs during the year—an enormous volume of change. That certainly might lead to perceptions of insecurity.

In the next chart we have some information through time. This chart gives the proportion of people within any firm who are experiencing a permanent lay-off in a year, or who quit that firm in the year, or who were hired to the firm in the year. These are not the only transitions—I didn't put temporary lay-offs on the chart, or other reasons for leaving—but these are the main ones, because there seems to be a growing perception that people are at greater risk of permanent lay-off and the data don't really bear out that perception. The risk is high, but it's high in good times, it's high in bad times. It's something we have lived with for a considerable period. It's not rising.

What is worrisome, though, is that if you do lose your job, the hiring rate is down. It's probably a lot more difficult to secure the next job.

• 1245

On the very last chart, again, we don't have longitudinal or historical data on the proportion of people with temporary, seasonal, or contract jobs. We've just begun to collect that on a monthly basis and we'll build up a series. But I think it's interesting to note that in 1997, 13% of all workers were in what we would call “non-permanent positions”. They were temporary, term, contract, or seasonal workers.

On average through the year, seasonal workers are 3% of all workers. I'm sure in the summer I would come back and that would be a much higher figure, but this is an average through the year. Clearly, it depends on which province you're in, whether or not seasonal work and temporary work are a large part of your labour market. There is great variation from east to west.

On that note, I'll end. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Okay, thank you.

Mr. Nault.

Mr. Robert Nault: I wanted to ask about the whole issue of self-employed. In the beneficiary-to-unemployment rate, it now is showing that 43% of Canadians, or I guess 42%-point-something this month, are eligible to collect EI. We still can't get a handle on why that is. Of course the opposition suggests it's because the employment insurance system has been dramatically changed, therefore you don't qualify any more. If the trends are so dramatic in the self-employment side, do the self-employed count in those statistics as they relate to that particular equation we use, the beneficiaries versus the employed?

I'm trying to get a handle on this dramatic drop...except that when you go to the Atlantic provinces the rate is still 79%. I don't understand how overall, nationally, it can be 42% and something, but in Atlantic Canada, where they have the highest unemployment rate and they have a lot of seasonal employees...do they not have self-employment trends, the same as in the rest of Canada?

A bunch of questions are mixed in there. I'm trying to get a sense of this whole thing of self-employed.

Mr. Bruce Petrie: I think the ratio you're referring to is the number of people who are receiving regular EI benefits—

Mr. Robert Nault: Beneficiaries versus the unemployed.

Mr. Bruce Petrie: —expressed as a percentage of the number of people who, in the labour force survey, are counted as unemployed. That is currently a little over 40%.

In the labour force survey we don't collect information on receipt of unemployment insurance benefits. But that ratio doesn't mean, when we say 1.5 million people are unemployed at a given time, 600,000 of the people we count as unemployed are receiving EI benefits. Some people we count as unemployed are not receiving benefits. Some people we count as not in the labour force are receiving benefits.

So you're comparing two numbers. It's a good indicator, but they are not from the same source, so you have to be a little careful in interpreting exactly what the numbers mean.

But clearly that ratio has dropped, and it does vary. We have had lots of occasions where in Newfoundland far more people are receiving UI benefits than are showing up as unemployed in the labour force survey. In other provinces we can have, conversely, a much lower percentage.

Currently the overall percentage has dropped. There are a variety of reasons for that, relating to eligibility for and duration of benefits, and simply the nature of administrative changes in the program. But from the labour force survey we can't, from our surveys to date, tell you exactly what are the contributors to the decline. They are obvious, but we can't give you quantified—

Mr. Robert Nault: My question is, because of the dramatic self-employed portion of the employment statistics, will that number not continue to drop because self-employed Canadians do not qualify for EI? That equation, that percentage the opposition and the media keep saying means we as a government don't care about the unemployed any more, because it has gone down dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s, is because the EI system is structured in such a way that you can't collect as long or the qualification criterion is much more severe. Is it not because, quite frankly, the self-employed are getting bigger and bigger as a proportion of the labour force? That's what I'm trying to find out, because your charts show a dramatic increase from just a little over 12% in 1976 to 18% in 1997. That's a significant amount of people who are self-employed, who never did qualify for employment insurance.

• 1250

Mr. Bruce Petrie: That could have a slight influence, but it wouldn't have the order of magnitude that I think you're looking at, because the decline in the ratio to which you refer has occurred over a period when there wasn't that big a growth in the proportion of self-employment.

Mr. Robert Nault: Okay. Thank you.

The Chairman: Mrs. Ablonczy.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: I have a couple of short questions for you.

This slide shows self-employment as the driving force behind employment growth, and then you have broken down the employment sectors. Does that relate back to self-employment?

Ms. Deborah Sunter: No. The next chart refers to total employment, but certainly, since 80% of employment growth over the same period is in self-employment, there is quite a close relationship between growth in self-employment and growth in business services.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: But you haven't broken it down per se.

Ms. Deborah Sunter: That's right.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: As for the chart that says demand is expected to continue to rise fastest with post-secondary qualifications, is there any study that shows in what sector of the economy or what skills set there will be the most demand in the future? Is there a study like that?

Ms. Deborah Sunter: I believe I would have to let HRDC speak to that. They use information on industry and occupation trends in the economy, and they project demand across skill levels and across occupation groups. I think they would be able to provide you with detail in terms of the demand.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: So that's another group we'll look to for that.

Ms. Deborah Sunter: Yes.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: On your slide that says 110,000 people reported they wanted to work but didn't look, you have two bars there: one is they didn't look because they were discouraged and the other is because they were unemployed. I wasn't quite sure what you meant there.

Ms. Deborah Sunter: No, it's simply a bar to show the difference in the size between the discouraged worker group and the unemployed group. The issue here is what size is the discouraged worker group relative to unemployment.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: Okay.

The last question I have wasn't dealt with directly in the slides. There have been allusions to the gap between high-income people and low-income people, the rich and the poor. I know that's somewhat addressed by transfers between income groups through the tax system and the social safety net and so forth, but after that's all factored in, can you give me some idea of how quickly that gap is widening?

Mr. Bruce Petrie: I think you're referring to the extent to which polarization, if you like, in earnings has been offset by the income from other sources—the transfer systems. Is that the question?

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: Not that, but after that's factored in, how much is the gap widening?

Ms. Deborah Sunter: Post-tax income.

Mr. Bruce Petrie: This is one of those difficult questions where one of my colleagues sitting behind me is much better equipped to answer than I, so if Mr. Picot could come along, he has done some studies on these matters and can probably answer.

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: That can be important when we're looking at the whole picture.

Mr. Garnett Picot (Director, Business and Labour Market Analysis Division, Statistics Canada): I'm Garnett Picot, director of business and labour market analysis division at StatsCan.

After you factor in all sources of income, including transfer payments, there has been no increase in the gap between the rich and the poor in Canada, unlike in the United States, where the gap has increased quite dramatically.

What we've seen in Canada is that in the labour market, the distribution of earnings, especially through the early 1980s, was such that there was an increasing gap in labour market earnings, but after you include transfers, that disappears. So there has been no increase in inequality in Canada at the family level after all income sources are considered.

• 1255

Mrs. Diane Ablonczy: I appreciate that information. Thank you.

The Chairman: Ms. Brown.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: I want to home right in on this point, Mr. Chairman. He says there is no widening of the gap between the rich and the poor in Canada, unlike in the United States.

How recent are your statistics? We heard a presentation—I remember it clearly, because it was one of those 7.30 a.m. breakfast meetings, which I hate but had to attend if I wanted to hear it—from a fellow who said that while the social programs of the past in Canada, before being downsized, had served society well by preventing an increase in the gap between the rich and the poor, the cutting back of social programs by both federal and provincial governments that was happening at the time, about 18 months ago, would begin to reveal, over time, a widening gap, as experienced in the United States.

In other words, the more recent types of governance, which in some people's minds are more reflective of the American type, will reveal the widening gap between the rich and the poor that many social observers are already mentioning.

How recent are your statistics whereby you say there is no widening of the gap between the rich and the poor?

Mr. Garnett Picot: The data I am referring to go up to 1995.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: Ah, interesting.

Mr. Garnett Picot: A lot of people are talking the way you've just described, that we may see changes as we look at 1996 and 1997, especially. We certainly don't have the data for 1997.

It is true that in 1995, and I think 1996, the proportion of the population at the low-income rate did rise, which is one aspect of inequality. But if you look at the gap between the rich and the poor, which we have been talking about, or measures of inequality, there is really no sign up through 1995. I'm not sure about 1996, to tell you the truth.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: I am interested in this, of course, as a member from Ontario, because what we have is pre-Mike Harris statistics. It will be very interesting to see the impact of Ontario's large population on the national statistics.

I don't know if you can do this, but in future, if you could track Ontario for us, we would be very interested to see the gap in the last couple of years—when you're able to put that together.

The Chairman: If I may jump in on this, I believe a Globe and Mail story this past Monday suggested that when they looked at it by province, in fact the gap had gotten wider, I think, in all provinces except Manitoba.

Mr. Garnett Picot: I didn't see that article. It certainly doesn't match with what we've observed.

As I said, it depends on how you look at the distribution. If you are looking at the proportion of people in low income, it has risen in 1995 and in 1996 where you would normally expect to see it falling because of where we are in the business cycle. When conditions are improving, you'd expect to see it falling.

If you take an inequality measure, which measures the gap between the rich and the poor, you don't see that gap increasing, nor has it traditionally increased in Canada over the eighties, where there was a huge increase in the U.S.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: But there are more poor people. The gap is about the same, but there are more people under the poverty line.

Mr. Garnett Picot: There is an increasing proportion of people in low income, yes.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: Thank you.

I will go back to the question I actually had wanted to ask prior to that comment. There are two charts I find particularly interesting. One is that few workers would prefer to give up work hours, and many want more.

When you asked that question, did you bother to bring in the money that is represented? From what I can understand, there are a lot of people who feel they are working too many hours. If they are salaried, they feel they cannot complain because they are easily replaced by someone who will work 60 hours a week. If they are not salaried, if they are hourly waged, they have in some cases not had any wage gains, and the value of their hourly wage has been reduced through inflation. Therefore, in order to maintain the financial responsibilities they have undertaken, such as a mortgage, or feeding and clothing their children, etc., they have to work as many hours as they do just to break even each month.

• 1300

So I can understand why they wouldn't want to give up hours: they don't want to fail financially, they don't want to go into personal bankruptcy, and they don't want to see themselves increasing their personal debt load month after month because they're not working enough hours.

But did you ever ask people working for a corporation, let's say, whether they would be willing to work fewer hours for maybe slightly less pay, but not a proportion that reflects the number of hours?

I've seen studies that say people would prefer to work four days a week, but they understand how that would impact the unemployment rate, because many more would have to be hired to keep a five-day work economy going. They would be willing to give up some money to accomplish that.

And when you tie that idea in with the outrageous salaries of people like bank presidents and people who are living like Arabian sheikhs in our society while other people are sinking into poverty, it seems to me there's some room to manoeuvre around the redistribution of wealth that would allow more people into the workforce and allow other people to work 37.5 hours a week instead of 60. How does this reflect all those various new ideas that are floating around?

Ms. Deborah Sunter: First of all, for this particular question I failed to say that the condition was that it would be at the same wage rate. So the understanding is that if you're going to work fewer hours—

Ms. Bonnie Brown: You get less money.

Ms. Deborah Sunter: —you're going to lose some money.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: Right.

Ms. Deborah Sunter: And if you're going to work more, you're going to make some money. Certainly that's key to understanding how people responded to it.

We are building up some information on the number of unpaid overtime hours, which is as large in this country as the number of paid overtime hours. I think it's important to ask how you could redistribute unpaid overtime hours and actually make a dent in unemployment, because there isn't any pay cheque attached to those unpaid hours that you can transfer.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: And there's fear of economic insecurity. People will not stand up to their bosses and say, “No, I've already worked 48 hours this week; that's equivalent to six days, and I'm not going to go the extra 12 for you.” They know there are all these hungry, highly trained and young unemployed people who would love to work that many hours, who have the energy to do so, and who want to work that many hours. Those young people would replace them. I think it's all based on economic insecurity.

Ms. Deborah Sunter: I'm sure there are many stories and data, and I certainly can't refute that or support it with what I know. But it is difficult to see how you could have 1:1 replacement of a few hours of everybody's time and match that to the kinds of skills and experience that the unemployed generally bring into the labour market. So certainly there are issues of redistribution even if you found a way to cut back on the hours.

Ms. Bonnie Brown: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Okay. Just before you start, Carolyn, for the information of members, we have had a slight glitch. Lunch was to be here about 15 minutes ago. It was circling the building a few minutes ago. It should be here momentarily. That's the bad news. The good news, however, is that this is a lunch that was ordered by our new clerk, so it should be similar in quality to our last one. So it's worth waiting for. That's all I'm saying.

And after these witnesses, we do have about four or five motions to deal with before we are free to leave.

Ms. Bennett can finish her questions. We will then take a very brief recess, grab lunch, and deal with our motions. Is that acceptable?

Some hon. members: Yes.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Mrs. Brenda Chamberlain: Now the pressure is on.

The Chairman: Carolyn.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: They're very hungry. I can feel that.

The Chairman: It'll shorten your questions is what it'll do.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: I think all of us love statistics in that they actually paint the picture. Those of us eagerly preparing for the next provincial election in Ontario would love post-Mike Harris statistics on some of these things, and I hope they will be forthcoming.

When we look at the people not working and the people who are discouraged, I guess I would love to know.... Previous attachment to the workforce seems to be a very serious part of policy development. Whether that's women who are at home and are now trying to get into the workforce or new Canadians or youth, are there statistics on the people who are out of work, who have never been attached to the workforce, and that's why they aren't qualifying for these programs that are already established? In creating new programs, what do we do? Are there some other numbers we could have that would help us in developing policies that would make it easier for people to get into the workforce?

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Ms. Deborah Sunter: Yes, we do know on a monthly basis. We can break down the unemployed in terms of those who have never worked, who are coming back in after being out for more than a year, who lost their last job and are therefore unemployed. There are some flow data. It's a monthly cross-sectional survey, so it provides a very limited view of the characteristics of people moving into unemployment, but certainly much more than the flavour I gave you today. We also have some other data sources, longitudinal data sources, that can be tapped to look at the characteristics of people moving in and out of unemployment.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: I was also interested in Ms. Brown's question about the people who say they wouldn't want to work any fewer hours, because I think we see that most households require 1.7 of an income or whatever it is just to get by. Is there a way we could create the 0.7 of a job, which would give particularly women with small children a way to be at home or working part-time and which wouldn't take the huge financial ding? Can we ask whether, through extended maternity leave or in some other way, we could make it more appealing for people to do part-time work and fulfil their responsibilities at home?

Ms. Deborah Sunter: What I seem to hear you suggesting is that if we had phrased the question in such a way that they weren't going to take the pay hit, a lot more people might have been willing to give up the hours. The question wasn't asked in that way, and I don't know.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: Or what degree of pay hit they could accommodate in their lives. When would it be that all of a sudden they couldn't possibly afford to work fewer hours?

I think other questions around this absolute slavery kind of overtime, with huge intimidation.... Even in the professional community it is something that seems to be a problem. It may not be that they like it. It's just that it's the only way they get to be a partner or the only way they won't be the next person laid off. There are people who seem happy to work their 60 hours.

The Chairman: Members, we'll take a five-minute recess before going in camera.