:
I call the meeting to order.
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to meeting number 48 of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities on Thursday, October 4, 2012.
We are starting a little late this morning. As you may well know, we changed locations from the Centre Block, where we meet normally, and that has caused a bit of confusion.
I know that Mr. Cleary is on his way and should be here any moment. We thank you, Mr. Cardozo, for being patient with us. Also Aleksandra Popovic, who was supposed to be here, was not able to make it to Ottawa. I understand that she will be joining Mr. Cardozo sometime during our hearing this morning via video conference.
As you know, we are studying the general area of fixing the skills gap, addressing existing labour shortages in high-demand occupations, understanding labour shortages, and addressing barriers to filling low-skill jobs.
We will start with your presentation, Mr. Cardozo, and after you have completed it, there will be rounds of questioning starting at that point. If Ms. Popovic should arrive, we'll hear her presentation as well. I see that Mr. Cleary has just joined us, so we have the full committee here.
Mr. Cardozo, if you wish to proceed, go ahead.
:
Thank you so much, Mr. Chair and members. Thank you for the introductions too, and the chance to be here to talk about the issues you're dealing with.
[Translation]
I am going to talk about five trends, namely, shifting economic powers, changing demographics, growth of knowledge, labour market mismatches, and the changing nature of work.
[English]
I will go through my slides fairly quickly so that I can cover the five trends in five minutes.
The first trend is the shifting economic powers in the world. Goldman Sachs has predicted that by the year 2050, China will be the number one economic power in terms of GDP, the U.S. number two, and India number three. Canada will slip in a sense, from number 10 to number 16, somewhere between Vietnam and the Philippines. I say “slip in a sense” because it won't necessarily slip; it's that the other powers will become stronger.
The relevance of that in terms of human capital is that it may affect the flow of human capital—not only financial capital, but human capital—as people may find certain countries less attractive than they do today.
The second trend is changing demographics. You are well aware of the aging population in Canada. There are some figures here comparing Canada to some of the other countries. Interestingly, it is the aboriginal population in Canada that is the youngest. I've got some figures to demonstrate that the median age of the aboriginal population is presently about 26.5, which is considerably less than the median age of 39.7 for the rest of the population.
The third trend that is interesting for human resource issues is the growth in knowledge. There is a projection that 60% of kids currently in kindergarten will work in jobs that do not currently exist. We are educating young people and kids for jobs that don't exist. That is part of the challenge ahead of us.
In terms of the growth in knowledge, there's an estimate that somewhere between 65% and 81% of young people and workers in the future will require post-secondary education, including university, college, and apprenticeship. We are essentially expecting the next generation to be both generalists and specialists: to have a fair amount of knowledge about a lot of different things, and at the same time be specialists as we specialize knowledge in a number of different areas.
Trend number four, which you are certainly well aware of, is the labour market mismatch. Dr. Rick Miner, whom you know, has talked about people without jobs and jobs without people. I've listed for you a number of the shortages that are projected for the next decade in their sectors of the economy. How did we get to this point? Certainly aging population is a major part of it, along with growth of the economy, rapidly changing technical requirements, a high level of issues with regard to adult literacy, and the high unemployment level among aboriginal people.
Some of the solutions to better align supply and demand are higher levels of literacy; workforce growth through immigration, which is a part of the solution; including aboriginal peoples more, and focusing more on their education attainment and job attainment; and the inclusion in the workplace of people with disabilities, older workers, and women in non-traditional occupations.
To go about this, we need a national skills strategy. By that I mean a skills strategy that involves all levels of governments, business, the education system across the country, and a number of other stakeholders.
The last trend that I want to mention is the changing nature of work. Career paths are changing by necessity because long-term jobs are hard to find or because upscaling becomes essential or both. The next slide, a brilliant slide by Professor Sylvain Bourdon of the Université de Sherbrooke, demonstrates through these three bars the changing nature of work.
In the first one, the traditional model, people were educated for about 20 years, worked for about 40 years, and then retired.
In the second model, which he has called the lengthened youth transition, people are educated for about 20 years, then for a period of another five or 10 years go back and forth through education and training and back through the work world. Then they get a steady job, work for another 30 years, and retire.
The third model is what he has called the lifelong learning model. This model has both positives and negatives to it. It shows people having a series of jobs that change on a regular basis. They transfer between jobs and training, periods of unemployment, and then periods when they do a bit of both; they may have unemployment and training at the same time, or work and training at the same time. The positives are that people engage in lifelong learning; the negatives are that it is increasingly difficult for people to have both long-term employment and long-term full-time employment.
Some of this happens through necessity: people often have to piece together two or three jobs, all or most of which are not very long term. Contract work, short-term work, is becoming more the norm. This is unsettling both for individuals and for the economy. It is harder for people in uncertain jobs to buy houses, cars, or other major purchases.
Those cover the five tendencies. Let me close with a couple of comments.
I work with the Alliance of Sector Councils, which is an alliance of some 30 organizations that deal with skills development in specific areas of the economy. Some of those were demonstrated in the two slides in which I showed you the skills shortages that exist. Councils deal with a number of issues, with labour market information being the core of what sector councils do. They cover issues such as aboriginal engagement, occupational standards, working with internationally trained workers, and workplace learning.
The rest of the slides, which I won't go through at this time, Mr. Chair, because of time constraints, cover some of the interesting and innovative solutions that various sector councils are involved in. The last slide I have is simply a listing of all the councils with their logos.
There are other important trends out there. One of the trends that I haven't talked about today is certainly the issue around literacy, and I'm very pleased that my colleague today will be talking about that in more detail. She certainly has a lot more expertise and knowledge of the issue than I do.
That covers my comments. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
ABC has had the privilege of appearing before this committee several times to speak to the importance of literacy and essential skills for Canadians. We appreciate being able to do so.
Today I'm pleased to be able to speak to you about this issue within the context of addressing existing labour shortages in high-demand occupations. We believe, and research demonstrates, that the weak literacy and essential skills of Canadians are directly related to the difficulties employers are having in finding the trained workers they need. When I speak of the essential skills, I'm referring to reading, writing, document use, and numeracy, which collectively are known as literacy skills, as well as oral communications, computer skills, thinking skills, working with others, and continuous learning.
Research undertaken earlier this year by Rogers Connect market research group on behalf of ABC Life Literacy Canada indicates that 80% of Canadian business leaders find it difficult to find qualified employees. More relevant to this committee, nearly half of these respondents attributed this difficulty to the low literacy and essential skills levels of Canada's labour pool.
The essential skills we looked at in this survey are not technical skills or job-specific skills required by particular occupations but, rather, the skills applied in all occupations. Those are the essential skills I just referred to.
Poor and low-level literacy and essential skills are a reality throughout Canada. According to the last international assessment in 2003, 42% of Canadians are at low levels of literacy. That means they fall below a high school graduate's level of literacy and struggle with common tasks. On a scale of one through five, it is generally understood that possessing essential skills at a minimum of level three complexity is required to manage the demands of day-to-day tasks in work, in one's life, and in learning.
New international research on the literacy and essential skill levels of Canadians is due to be released next year. It is known as the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. Sadly, early indications suggest that we will not see significant improvement in these scores. This reality is seen in workplaces across the country.
Please allow me to illustrate the impact this deficiency has on the lives of some Canadians.
A personal support worker misses out on training opportunities because she cannot read the information flyer she received with her pay stub. Her manager assumes she’s not interested.
A machine operator does not follow safe handling procedures of a chemical because he does not understand the MSDS.
Each month, a grocery store clerk misses his shift the first day after the new schedule is posted.
At a production team meeting, an employee is reluctant to share a good idea that would lead to efficiencies, for fear she would be asked to speak in front of everyone or maybe even write it down. Her supervisor finds her disengaged.
A maintenance worker is unaware of the implementation of a new alarm system because he does not know that the posted memo is intended for him.
A cashier is regularly short in his till.
A powder-coating company has an excellent team with incredible workmanship on all orders to date. Suddenly, there is a sharp increase in errors on job specifications just after a computerized system is introduced on the production floor.
The company newsletter includes important graphs and projections for the coming year that a line operator doesn’t realize forecasts a decline in sales that could likely result in a shortage of work.
Employees in a hospital must now log into the intranet to access relevant information, and their manager is finding that many are missing important deadlines.
A newly hired employee signs her employment contract without reading the policies and procedures.
Increasingly, we see Canadian business and employers, large and small, recognizing the importance of improving the skills of Canadians. For instance, I point to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s recent report, “Top 10 Barriers to Competitiveness”, which puts skills training at number one. Their more recent report on consultations around this clearly identifies literacy and essential skills as a problem to be addressed. I quote:
We need to focus seriously on upgrading the skills of our existing employees.
Our members told us the dismaying story of a workforce which often lacks basic skills—literacy, numeracy, communication skills.
Canada urgently needs to revamp its policies, programs and attitudes to support continuous, life-long learning and skills upgrading.
The Chamber of Commerce goes on to recommend that the business community step up its investment in workplace training.
At ABC we couldn’t agree more. We believe that improving the literacy and essential skills of Canadians is a shared responsibility. Governments, employers, literacy organizations, employees, and Canadians in general have a role to play. It is not one sector's fault or responsibility; we must all work together to find the solutions, especially for our high-demand sectors and jobs.
In the view of ABC Life Literacy Canada, we believe this committee could make a significant contribution to the improvement of this issue by making recommendations that call on a more integrated approach that engages government, business, literacy providers, and individual Canadians. For too long the existing system has served Canadians in a scattered approach, yielding inadequate improvement in literacy and essential skills of Canadians.
When my colleague, ABC President Margaret Eaton, appeared before you last year, she illustrated the effectiveness and impact of integrated programs at diamond mines in the Northwest Territories. The training programs include literacy and basic skills, the opportunity to attain a GED diploma, and job-specific training on equipment and systems. The program has become a model for other industries and sectors that need a large, highly skilled workforce, such as forestry and energy.
Most important to the conversation this morning, this program was partially funded by the territorial government and partially by the employer, and it included a contribution of time from the employees.
Large employers typically play a significant and large role in the programs such as the one I’ve just highlighted, but skills-based, high-demand jobs are found with employers both large and small. The small and medium-sized employer sector, the acknowledged engine of Canadian employment, cannot be left out of this conversation. Integrated policies and measures need to be found that provide the means to help the employees of small and medium-sized businesses where there are also high-demand jobs.
In this committee’s report, “Skills Development in Remote Rural Communities in an Era of Fiscal Restraint”, tabled in June, recommendations included a tax credit supporting private sector training programs aimed at the aboriginal population in remote communities.
ABC Life Literacy Canada was pleased to see this in your report.
As a long-standing advocate of policy measures that would incent employers to come to the table to support essential skills training, we urge you to consider similar recommendations to truly incent a shared approach to essential skills training in Canada. A tax credit for essential skills training in the workplace would go a significant way in this regard and encourage employers, large and small, to invest in essential skills training.
Through such measures, the leadership of our federal government can help ensure that our workforce has the skills that will allow Canadians to be successful in those high-demand jobs and ensure that Canadian business thrives.
Thank you for the opportunity for appearing before you this morning.
Thank you very much for your question, Mr. Daniel
Certainly I think the solution lies in a lot of partners working together. From a federal perspective, we want to think about Canada as a whole in terms of having a competitive economy. When we're thinking about competition with China or India or Argentina, it's Canada as a whole, as a workforce, as an economy, that we look at in terms of competing.
The other aspect for the federal government to be interested in is the issue of mobility. Canadians want to be able to move from province to province, and employers want to be able to employ people from wherever they're coming from. Even though the federal government doesn't have a direct role, as you point out, in education and training, it certainly can have a convening role, and to some extent it has played that role.
Many provinces are very much interested in a national approach that would have the federal government at the table. Indeed the current minister of HRDC was at the meeting of the Forum of Labour Market Ministers for the first time a couple of years ago. That's a forum that had fallen away, to an extent. I'm glad to say that all the ministers, federal and provincial, see it as a really important forum for working together.
In terms of working with industry, Ms. Popovic mentioned the report by the Chamber of Commerce. I think a number of the business organizations have become very concerned about and interested in the issue of skills shortages, especially in the past year or two, more than ever before.
Of course the sector councils, which I'm part of, bring together industry members with educators and government to work on these solutions. We don't deal with advocacy and we don't deal with advice that much; we deal with developing solutions, developing workplace learning, developing standards, and developing labour market information that is useful to employers.
Mr. Cardozo, I found one of the statements in your opening very interesting. You talked about how jobs don't yet exist for children in kindergarten, and I was thinking, when you said that, about how much of a challenge that must be for educators. I was also thinking about how there must be a real emphasis on the basics like math, science, English, French—the basics.
Then I heard your presentation, Ms. Popovic, and I heard what you had to say in terms of weak literacy rates, in terms of the 42% of Canadians you mentioned with low literacy skills and the challenge that deficiency is for employers in addressing low productivity and that sort of thing.
Mr. Daniel, when he asked his question, began with noting that the individual provinces are responsible for basic education.
My question is this: in the school system—primary, elementary, and high school—do students have the basics? Are our school systems doing the job?
Mr. Shory, you would certainly be aware that in your province, for example, where the economy is red-hot, there is a range of shortages, both high-skilled and low-skilled. To give you an example from tourism, you have several locations across the province of Alberta where you might have a Tim Hortons that has to close at 6:00 p.m. because it can't find workers to work there, or there may be hotels that can't use all of their rooms because they don't have enough staff to work those rooms. There is a considerable shortage of people in lower-skilled areas.
I think what we're trying to do is match people up better. The temporary foreign worker program, for example, has provided some relief in that area, and certainly mobility across the country. One of the things we should be looking at, in terms of temporary foreign workers, is ensuring that lower-skilled workers can come under those programs, especially the provincial nominee program, which tends to focus on higher-skilled workers.
I don't want to suggest that we don't want to encourage everybody to have higher levels of literacy and essential skills. As my colleague was mentioning, there are really very few jobs left in which people can operate without a decent level of literacy because of everything from having to read a safety notice to having to record by computer a lot of different things that people work at. Regardless of where you are in the system, I think people need to have some basic level of literacy and computer literacy.
:
Thank you, Chair. It's an honour to be on this committee.
I'm going to follow up a little bit on Mr. Shory's questions on the aboriginal community. In my riding in Cape Breton, the fastest-growing community I have is the Eskasoni. They're the largest aboriginal community in Atlantic Canada.
One of our main economic drivers in Cape Breton is the work that is in Fort McMurray and places like that.
I see the Eskasoni as just an example of many aboriginal communities. Most of the time they're in remote areas. There's a disconnect with the real economy and what's happening, and they don't have a sense of what opportunities are there.
This morning in The Globe and Mail there's an article that says “Native leaders reject Ottawa's education overhaul”. It seems that the federal government, which is responsible for the education of aboriginals, is not on the same page as the native leaders.
That said, I see the German model. I don't know if you are familiar with the German model with apprentices, with people in many of the skills in industry, but the German education system reaches to a younger age, like a junior high level, finds out what the kids are interested in, shows them different avenues that they can go in, and helps them all the way through that path. It's not as though they wait until grade 12 in Germany and then ask what they want to do; they reach younger people and show them a bit of a framework where they can go and apply.
I think the German model in the aboriginal community should be used more. You'd be going right to younger people and showing them the opportunities, showing them the jobs that are out there in the future and what they could be doing.
I really believe the unions, the private sector, and government have a role in this regard. It's a vested interest, because these are the fastest-growing communities in Canada and they have the highest unemployment. These kids are very capable, but they're not given a pathway to achieve that goal.
I would like to get your comments on what we're doing wrong. I know you gave a few examples, but that's not really what I was hoping for, a few examples. I think the article in The Globe and Mail is saying that this has failed. From the federal government's perspective, there has to be a better model overall for these native communities. I will leave it at that.
:
I think the issue of aboriginal engagement in education is an increasingly urgent one, in part because it is the fastest-growing demographic in Canada: about 50% of the aboriginal population is under the age of 25. The other interesting thing is that about half the aboriginal population lives in urban centres, so there are issues you referred to, Mr. Eyking, that are relevant to on-reserve residents and then there are other kinds of issues that are relevant to the urban aboriginal population.
I think there are a few different things that we need to be thinking about. I agree with your approach in terms of looking at the German model for apprenticeship across the board. Part of the culture change that I think would be very useful in Canada is that we seriously undervalue the apprenticeships or the trades in general, so in high school kids are basically encouraged to go to university. That's the number one thing that all kids are pushed to. In fact, we all do that in our families, or at least most of us do that, unfortunately. Then the message in high school is that if you're not good enough for university, well, you could go to college, and if you're really not good enough for that, then there are the trades.
That's quite unfortunate, because quite often when you look at it 10 years later, the kids who went through apprenticeships are doing very well, while some of those who got a B.A. in political science are floundering and not able to find a job. We have it backwards when we think a university education is the guarantee to a job and comfort for life. I think we need to look at that part of a change in our culture and provide more value to the trades and to apprenticeships.
If I can come back to the aboriginal population, I can't say that I've seen a program—and I'm not an expert on it—that is really successful enough with on-reserve aboriginal kids. It's a bit easier in the urban centres, where you have a more well-developed educational system and more supports in that system. I think provinces like Manitoba and Saskatchewan, which are projecting that in the next few years half of the population in some cities will be aboriginal, are much more seized with it and further advanced on this issue than are other provinces.