Upon reaching adulthood, Aboriginal people often have to deal with barriers to their education and labour market integration. These obstacles are on various levels; they are often interrelated, and they form a complex problem. But solutions have emerged, sometimes from training organizations, sometimes from the Aboriginal communities themselves, not to mention private sector initiatives, which will be discussed in the next chapter of this report. This chapter provides an overview of some of the difficulties encountered by Aboriginal people with respect to training and labour market integration; it discusses practices that provide solutions to those problems and sets out the Committee’s recommendations.

A. Issues at stake, promising approaches and recommendations

1. Lack of essential skills

From the perspective of Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), whose officials spoke to the Committee on 5 December 2013, the main barrier standing between First Nations and successful skills development is the lack of essential skills.[35]

The essential skills often named by witnesses include, for example, interpersonal relationships in the workplace, punctuality and regular attendance, literacy and a command of information technology tools.

As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the statistics for formal education levels are less than glowing for a large proportion of Aboriginal people, too many of whom do not graduate from high school. The completion of a high school education is considered a minimum standard in Canadian society and usually represents the best assurance that a person will have the essential qualifications for employment. Since many Aboriginal people fail to acquire these essential qualifications through the school system, many alternatives have been developed to help them obtain these competencies.

The representative of the Assembly of First Nations addressed this issue in her testimony before the Committee:

[U]ntil such time as the First Nations high school graduation rates equal Canadian levels, more resources such as pre-employment essential skills training will be needed for clients who lack high school completion.[36]

Judy Whiteduck Assembly of First Nations

The Prince George Nechako Aboriginal Employment and Training Association also discussed this matter:

[T]here is an increasing number of youth exiting the high school system with a leaving-school certificate or a diploma who are functioning far below the competency level that is required to be a success in a trade. So we are having to play catch-up and there are additional resources that are required to develop the workplace literacy that is required in addition to providing them with the other types of essential skills and the industry soft skills that are necessary to be successful in maintaining a job.[37]

Karin Hunt Prince George Nechako Aboriginal Employment and Training Association

Various organizations have developed innovative solutions to address the lack of essential skills in the Aboriginal population.

The Aboriginal Mentoring and Training Association (AMTA) of British Columbia offers the Pathways to Success program to the majority of its participants:

Every AMTA candidate completes a test of workplace essential skills. In consultation with our industry partners, we've decided to focus on our candidates' reading, numeracy, and document-use levels. Through this assessment we find that about 70% of our candidates need to enter our pathways to success program. In order to improve their essential skills, pathways to success also includes many confidence-building exercises like life skills, coaching, workplace orientation, and getting special licences and tickets that will help our candidates become more aware of the requirements of entering into long-term employment.[38]

Laurie Sterritt Aboriginal Mentoring and Training Association

AMTA views its approach as innovative and a model that should be followed:

The standard approach within the education setting says everyone should be treated equally. The AMTA model challenges this very assumption, and delivers an innovative model for training and development: a candidate-focused solution. In my opinion, the AMTA model is one that everyone should follow because we've proven that by tackling the issue one person at a time, one by one, we're helping Aboriginal learners achieve their potential and make a contribution to their economic health, to their families and their communities, to the province, and to Canada.[39]

Jeannette Jules Aboriginal Mentoring and Training Association

Similarly, the Ignite Adult Learning Corporation has also developed a successful model for increasing the essential skills of its Aboriginal participants:

[L]ike a business, we are open all year round. Each year we take 30 to 45 at risk young adults from the ages of 19 to 30, and they're hired to work at Ignite. Their job is to learn seven and a half hours a day, five days a week. Wages are deducted for lateness and absenteeism. Poor performance, and chronic absenteeism are causes for dismissal from the program.[…] Our success rate is about 70% - 75% over the many years.[40]

Carlo Bizzarri Ignite Adult Learning Corporation

It is a highly successful approach that results in lasting positive change in the community — an approach that continues to prove that it is more effective and efficient, socially and economically, to invest in the potential of young adults than it is to finance their incarceration and rehabilitation.[41]

Another success story presented to the Committee was that of the Regina and Saskatoon Trades and Skills Centres. The Saskatchewan Apprenticeship and Trade Certification Commission described their approach as follows:

They have a formula that should be replicated more. What those two organizations do is, first of all, they offer very short programs. From a pre-employment perspective, they're not 20 weeks long, they're six to eight weeks long.

In those six to eight weeks they do a few things very well. First off, they offer some basic safety training so that the employer knows they're not going to hurt themselves or somebody else on their first day of the job. They give them a basic orientation to the tools so they're going to be somewhat productive. They build that attachment with employers so that at the end of that eight-week period, all of those students are offered a job. The last thing is that they really focus on essential skills. If you don't show up every day for one of the trades and skills centre's courses, they'll fire you, just like what happens in a real job. They focus very hard in those four areas and they've had great success.

They're a wonderful feeder program for the apprenticeship system because students who complete there go on to get jobs.[42]

Jeff Ritter Saskatchewan Apprenticeship and Trade Certification Commission

For its part, the Association of Canadian Community Colleges (ACCC) says it has “led Employment and Social Development Canada to fund essential skills projects in recent years”.[43]

[Those projects] have demonstrated the impact of essential skills. For example, findings in 17 pilot projects across Canada indicated that up to 60% of learners and workers tested were below level three literacy, which is what is needed to function in society. After some hours, 24 to 40 hours of essential skills training, students and workers demonstrated learning gains and improved performance.[44]

Denise Amyot Association of Canadian Community Colleges

The ACCC also believes that, as a general rule, employability or training interventions that are longer and more flexible, and therefore less geared to direct employment, make it possible to more effectively address upgrading and essential skills development needs.[45]

RECOMMENDATION 5

The Committee recommends that the federal government continue to support initiatives that provide Aboriginal people with access to high-quality training in essential skills, including individualized training programs where appropriate.

2. Cultural disconnect

The disconnect between Aboriginal culture and the culture of the business community or of learning institutions is another potential barrier to the labour market integration of Aboriginal people.

Several organizations referred to the reciprocal nature of this lack of understanding between cultures.

For example, the Prince George Nechako Aboriginal Employment and Training Association noted that:

Culture works both ways, of course. We work toward being able to provide awareness to industry and to employers about the Aboriginal culture, but we also work very hard to prepare our young folks for the culture of the industry. Every industry has its own culture, so it's necessary to do that cross-awareness.[46]

Karin Hunt Prince George Nechako Aboriginal Employment and Training Association

Along those same lines, the AMTA indicated that:

[I]f you get to the human issue, it's that I assume something about you and you assume something about me. In a workplace that happens no matter what the person's background is. If I assume that First Nations are not interested in natural resource development or extraction or mining, then I might not look to them as a natural workforce. If the First Nations believe that's just a big, bad mining company that wants to come and strip away all of our natural resources, I might not look to them as a potential employer.[47]

Laurie Sterritt Aboriginal Mentoring and Training Association

Chief Bruce Underwood, Program Employability Officer with the Coast Salish Employment and Training Society, also made similar statements:

[W]hen we talk about essential skills for employment and about feeling self-pride and self-identity, […] I think numeracy, literacy, and all of those things are very important. But when you look at where we come from as a people, it's also important to know the language and to have the elders incorporated.

It doesn't mean just culturally. We need to bridge the cultural gap to mainstream society. A lot of our people might figure there's discrimination on the work site when somebody's up there yelling, “Throw these down and get me that cord.” […] but that's the language, and that's the culture on the construction site. We don't have enough of those mechanisms in place to have that cross-cultural bridge….[48]

Chief Bruce Underwood Coast Salish Employment and Training Society

In their presentation to the Committee, ESDC officials also touched upon this perception of work culture as being somehow discriminatory. “We find that the common work culture is often seen by the Aboriginal employee as being discriminatory. Often that can be overcome simply with better cultural understandings between groups.”[49] The Department’s representative cited as a positive example a project with the De Beers mining company, which “actually involves a community representative who works in the company, not as an actual miner but as a liaison between the community, the company, and the individuals, to ensure that any issues that arise in the workplace can be resolved.”[50]

The representative of the Aboriginal Labour Force Development Circle also raised the issue of cultural adaptation:

For our people, to leave the community for the first time is a major issue and definitely a culture shock. There are many of our people who speak their traditional languages. Many of the standard programs and skilled trades or training institutes are not developed to meet the uniqueness of some of our people's training requirements, nor do they have cultural uniqueness attached to them.[51]

Steven Williams Aboriginal Labour Force Development Circle

The problem of culture shock is in fact closely related to the distance that Aboriginal people often have to travel in order to gain access to training or job opportunities. The barrier represented by remoteness is discussed in greater detail in other sections of this report. However, one of the solutions put forward to reduce the extent of culture shock also helps in solving the distance problem:

To help in addressing these issues we have located many of our offices either in a First Nation Community or as close to a First Nation as we can. We have established some of our locations so we are in close proximity to a number of other First Nation Communities. Our offices are now well known in our communities and we have grown to know our people and their families…[52]

Various witnesses also referred to the importance of instituting cultural awareness training in businesses.

The Forest Products Association of Canada was clear on this subject:

Among several foundational steps in building constructive relationships [between industry and Aboriginal communities], one key measure is cultural awareness training, which has the potential to enable more effective relationships with Aboriginal communities.[53]

Among the industry representatives to have put such cultural awareness training in place, Suncor shared its experience with the Committee:

We have for the last few years put all of the relevant employees through some Aboriginal awareness training, which we think has been very helpful to help them understand some of the cultural norms and some of the individual traits of the Aboriginal history, and so on. That was an important barrier for us to remove internally…[54]

Heather Kennedy Suncor

RECOMMENDATION 6

The Committee recommends that the federal government encourage industry partners to implement new or enhance existing Aboriginal cultural awareness programs and to foster improved cultural understanding in the workplace.

3. Distance to training or job opportunities from remote communities

As mentioned previously, the fact that many members of the Aboriginal population reside in geographically remote areas constitutes a significant barrier to their participation in training or in the labour market itself. As described by one witness:

Within the Aboriginal community, a large segment of the labour force resides in rural or remote settings. Transportation, living-away-from-home costs, and suitable accommodations can be a major factor if the jobs are located a distance away from an individual’s home community.[55]

Karin Hunt Prince George Nechako Aboriginal Employment and Training Association

According to another witness, this is often the leading barrier to labour market participation by Aboriginal people:

Perhaps the biggest barrier of all is often the proximity of training to the communities, making transportation and living support in those communities for those individuals of utmost importance.[56]

Ian Anderson Kinder Morgan

This is in addition to the previously mentioned culture shock associated with having to travel a considerable distance away from one’s community in order to work.

More specifically still, the fact that many Aboriginal people do not have driver’s licences was mentioned as being one of the key challenges to be addressed by many businesses and organizations.[57]

According to the Saskatchewan Apprenticeship and Trade Certification Commission, distance makes it more complicated for Aboriginal people on reserve to pursue apprenticeship training.

[I]t's difficult for First Nations people on reserve to continue with their apprenticeship training. This is due to lack of employment in close proximity and a tight attachment to their community. On-reserve training requires additional financial supports, as well as opportunities for paid work experience or employment transition.[58]

Jeff Ritter Saskatchewan Apprenticeship and Trade Certification Commission

To address the distance problem, some stakeholders have started delivering their services directly in the communities, much like the Aboriginal Labour Force Development Circle, which — as noted above — has taken the initiative of establishing offices in or near Aboriginal communities.

For example, the ACCC told the Committee that the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology in British Columbia, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and Cambrian College in Ontario all have mobile trades training trailers that provide hands-on training in Aboriginal communities based on the needs identified by community leaders and industry partners.[59]

Similarly, Vale referred to a partnership with post-secondary institutions that resulted in the development of “a mobile classroom … in a transport truck with walls that move. […] We bring it out to the First Nations communities where sometimes the youth are reluctant to leave the community to go to school. We bring the classroom to them.” [60]

As well, companies such as Cameco may offer transportation to their employees. The Cameco representative explained that the company operates an air transportation system with 13 stops in northern Saskatchewan, “which addresses the isolation and remoteness of communities.”[61]

Also, this company’s “work schedule is one week at work and one week off,” which “allows Aboriginal people to reside in their home community and maintain the traditional lifestyle if they choose.” The company also has “... excellent communication services on site, including cellular service and Internet. This allows employees to remain in contact with family, which is important to Aboriginal people.”[62]

Lastly, another approach to the problem of distance associated with education or work consists in supporting entrepreneurship in Aboriginal communities.

The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples is among the proponents of this approach: “Funding for self-employment provides financing to individuals to enable them to utilize their skills to provide a product or service and to create jobs. Aboriginal entrepreneurs need support and training to acquire the necessary business and financial skills.”[63]

One of the organizations working to support Aboriginal entrepreneurship that has achieved a great deal of success in this area is the Kakivak Association in Nunavut.

Our success rate with businesses in the last 10 years has been about 80%. […] In a lot of cases, we work from the very beginning. […] We give a grant to assist them with a feasibility study, with a business plan, and that sort of thing. Then we start working with other organizations, Baffin Business Development Corporation — organizations like that — and with Economic Development and Transportation, Government of Nunavut, and we start leveraging funding from other organizations to assist them to either start their business or to purchase a business, for example. Then we would move to the aftercare phase, where our staff would assist them with the operations, with their accounting processes, and that sort of thing.[64]

Scott Wells Kakivak Association

Hence, the solutions proposed to address the challenges associated with distance and transportation are also very useful in reducing the cultural adaptation problems discussed in the previous section of this report.

4. Systemic psychosocial problems and poor infrastructure

Several witnesses explained that before many Aboriginal people can be ready to start training or accept a job, they must first work to resolve numerous issues of a psychosocial nature.

Some of the personal barriers mentioned in this context include problems associated with housing, addictions, poverty, physical health and low self-esteem.

In a brief to the Committee, the Centre for Aboriginal Human Resources Development (CAHRD) described the difficulties confronting its clients and the importance of taking a holistic intervention approach.

Over 80% of the clients that assessed as needing education and training have transfer payments as their income. They have not adopted mainstream culture and are not living Aboriginal culture but rather the culture of poverty with all its debilitating effects, including lack education and training, and/or work ethic. This is one of the major issues in trying to assist Aboriginal people into the workforce. They often are not motivated because they don’t have hope and don’t believe that they can change their circumstances. This is why it is important that employment programs continue to have resources and flexibly to address the potential job seeker in a holistic manner.[65]

The issue of training individuals is often not a straight-forward matter, particularly among adult clients who are living in poverty and are multi-barriered. For many of CAHRD’s clients, issues such as safe and affordable housing, child care, and developing esteem are challenges that they face on a daily basis as they progress through the various programs offered by CAHRD. In order to have as much success for its clients, the centre ensures that as many as possible client needs are being met through a variety of on-site support services.…[66]

Among other things, CAHRD operates a housing complex to help its participants stabilize their personal situation.

The Aboriginal Labour Force Development Circle described in its brief a similar situation:

Our offices do not only take people that are “work ready” and have decided to get a job or more training. What we often do is work with our people who have decided that they want a “life change”. For most parts, our people require several interventions.[…] We accept the young, the addicts, the single parents, the elderly or the person off the street and we start from the beginning. Often times we have to refer to other agencies to help our people overcome a multitude of barriers and […] to help them prepare for the life change. […] Fortunately, a lot of them come back to us and then our work begins again.[67]

Others emphasized the importance of in-depth support services that provide assistance to the whole person.

In its presentation, the Métis National Council emphasized the importance of ensuring that future federal Aboriginal employment programs continue to provide broader support and lasting interventions to people who are not ready to work because they have obstacles to overcome.[68]

RECOMMENDATION 7

The Committee recommends that the federal government, in its Aboriginal programs, take into account the importance of comprehensive support services in several areas of the lives of Aboriginal people to allow them to overcome barriers to their success in the labour force.

On a final note, infrastructure problems in Aboriginal communities sometimes add to the systemic problems described above. Apart from transportation infrastructure, which is problematic for several remote communities as noted above, Goldcorp explained to the Committee that the lack of electricity in some communities is also a sizeable obstacle.

One of the challenges we face, particularly with remote communities, is that they don't have things like power.[…] If you don't have things like grid power, it's hard to set up a training institution in order for their communities to attend training courses where they can better themselves and then leapfrog into the industry.[69]

Colin Webster Goldcorp

5. Gender-specific issues

Similar to the importance of addressing participants’ psychosocial difficulties, some witnesses emphasized the need to consider the realities facing women in the context of Aboriginal training and employment.

The Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) referred to the problem of traditionally male and female jobs and the economic difficulties experienced by women.

Although Aboriginal women have higher educational rates [than Aboriginal men], education and health care tend to be the predominant fields of study. This gender bias persists in the broader labour market as well, in which Canadian women are heavily over-represented in areas related to the public sector while men are concentrated in those high growth industries related to resource extraction and construction, industries that have higher levels of income. Among Aboriginal peoples, this gender divide is even more glaring. Females represent 82.3% of Aboriginal employees in health care, education, and public administration, compared with 70.4% among non-Aboriginal employees.[70]

Over the course of the past 20 years, the troubling socio-economic outcomes of Aboriginal women have been well documented. The multiple barriers they face in entering and retaining employment in the labour market are numerous. When comparing

non-Aboriginal women with their male counterparts, the statistics all demonstrate that Aboriginal women have lower income levels and work in lower occupational categories.[71]

Beverly Blanchard Native Women’s Association of Canada

NWAC provides employment and training interventions including paying for individual training, such as college or individual training leading to a degree, job creation partnerships, assistance to Aboriginal workers to help them create their own small businesses, and targeted wage subsidies. These services are available to all Aboriginal women, regardless of their status.[72]

Several witnesses referred to the strong presence of single mothers in their services.[73] In fact, according to Statistics Canada, about one-third of Aboriginal children (34.4%) lived in a lone-parent family in 2011 compared with 17.4% of non-Aboriginal children. Among these Aboriginal children and non-Aboriginal children living in a lone-parent family, the majority lived with a female lone parent.[74]

In connection with this phenomenon, one of the recommendations repeated most often during the course of the study concerned the need for participants, who are often women, to have access to child care services in order to start training or accept a job.[75] It was pointed out that child care services needed to be culturally adapted and flexible in terms of schedule, since some training is given in the evening.

[I]n terms of women as a demographic and part of the workforce, the ability to participate in the workforce often points to the need for child care capacities. Women are a very important part of the First Nations workforce, whether it be in the public or private sectors.[76]

Judy Whiteduck Assembly of first Nations

More specific recommendations on how the issue of child care services should be addressed by federal programs are presented in Chapter 4 entitled “Renewal of the Aboriginal Skills and Employment Training Strategy and Other Programs.”

Concerning promising practices, Suncor told the Committee that it paid special attention to hiring women and to the availability of child care services.

At Suncor, 23% of our workforce is female. Considering the mining and resource natureof our business, that's pretty high. We target a lot of female employees. We offer child care at our head office in Calgary. We don't offer it at our various sites, but we do, through our community arm, support local child care. In Fort McMurray and Fort McKay, 15 years ago there was a child care crisis in those communities, and we actually were a leader in working with the community—Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, in the case of Fort McMurray—to find the right people to provide that child care and to support it.[77]

Heather Kennedy Suncor

In addition, the Aboriginal Internship Program (AIP) developed by Acosys Consulting Services Inc., an Aboriginal company, is a model that seems to work well with Aboriginal women. The AIP has already proven successful in helping Aboriginal people find professional employment and management-level careers within top-tier private sector employers through working with businesses, mentoring and job shadowing, and enabling Aboriginal people and interns to obtain certification through university programs while working on live project delivery on client sites. The whole idea behind this program is that, over the years, Aboriginal people who have been hired to management positions in private businesses will be in a better position to hire more Aboriginal people, thereby creating a multiplying effect. Acosys told the Committee that the vast majority of the program participants were Aboriginal women who often were going back to university in order to start a second or third career. Acosys proposed to collaborate with the federal government to expand the AIP into a three-year national pilot program that would provide financial support to 10 participants per year.[78]

Programs that facilitate Aboriginal people’s access to professional and management positions in the private sector remain scarce, as evidenced by the testimony presented in the following section.

6. Marginalization of a significant proportion of the Aboriginal population in subordinate jobs

Some witnesses decried the fact that the labour market participation of Aboriginal people was confined almost exclusively to entry-level positions.

For example, Syncrude told the Committee that:

Clearly, one of our challenges, which I think is true for the entire industry, is that we are extraordinarily successful at attracting employees in the more occupational and trades aspects of our business, and we all continue to seek opportunities to move Aboriginal people across all aspects of our business into the more professional, technical, and engineering and sciences aspects of our operations.[79]

Kara Flynn Syncrude

Suncor alluded to the same difficulty:

As for the management level, the representation [of Aboriginal people] is predominantly more in the unionized workforce, but we do have some at the management level. But […] it starts to get smaller as you go up into the leadership programs, so that is one area of focus for us.[80]

Mary-Pat Campbell Suncor

Acosys said much the same thing:

[T]here's no [Aboriginal] management layer in corporate Canada. By this I mean an operational management layer, not the vapour trails that we see right now with the appointment of Aboriginal leadership to the boardrooms. It seems that the influence has always been down at the entry-level position skill level. At the management level, where the buying and hiring is being made, there's no Aboriginal representation there.[81]

David Acco Acosys

Apart from Acosys’ AIP, described in the previous section, there are several other promising practices in place.

For example, the Cameco and Rio Tinto companies both have programs to facilitate the advancement of Aboriginal persons within their organizations.

[At Cameco,] we have several programs to allow people to move up within the company. Typically most Aboriginal people are hired at the entry levels, so it's very important to move them into those supervisory roles that come with experience. We have some formal programs such as our career transition program whereby we pay employees' wages while they return to university to obtain a degree and perhaps move to a more professional role.[82]

Russel Mercredi Cameco

[A]ctivities for Rio Tinto include things like providing on-the-job training as part of the skill process, and operating the in-house educational upgrades so that an individual who may come in at an entry level doesn't need to stay at an entry level. They can work towards entry into things like trades, education, development of supervisory skills, or other activities.[83]

Jay Fredericks Rio Tinto

This leads us to examine the role of the private sector in Aboriginal skills development.