Finance Committee on March 27th, 2014

[Andrew Saxton, Conservative, North Vancouver, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to our witnesses for being here today.

My first questions are for Ms. Robinson from Polytechnics Canada.

Ms. Robinson, you're probably aware that our government recently reached an agreement for the Canada job grant program with the provinces, and this new program will bring together the federal government, the provincial governments, and businesses into a partnership to deliver skills training. My question to you is, first of all, what is your opinion of the Canada job grant? Also, what role will Polytechnics play in helping to deliver those skills?

[Nobina Robinson]

What I have always liked about the concept of the Canada job grant is the focus on involving employers. That said, large urban colleges and polytechnics will have to wait to see what demand is created because it really is up to the employer to find the worker who they wish to have trained. We are waiting to see the traffic that will come from the grant.

Our large publicly funded colleges are very dependent on these provincial operating grants. These sorts of training programs are fairly small potatoes for the bread and butter of the programs we're talking about. The Canada job grant will go to things like up-scaling in the short term. That's not the same as the full range of full-time credentials that we are really focused on.

That said, the objective of the Canada job grant, where we want to actually deal with the lack of employer investment in training, we hope will work; we want to see it work. Now, there were all sorts of negotiations around this pot of money, and that has been a concern. As we say, there are billions of dollars being transferred to the provinces, and I'd say the solution here is to talk about what the outcome of the program is. Let's focus on the outcome.

[Andrew Saxton, Conservative, North Vancouver, BC]

Yes, but surely there is an opportunity, a big opportunity, for polytechnics to get involved in helping to deliver these skills.

[Nobina Robinson]

Again, we'll have to wait to see the demand coming. When we look at the kinds of small companies that will have to sponsor the worker to go and get the training, we're hoping that there will be flexibility in the implementation of the grant so that companies can pool their demand and we can train 15 people in the same kind of up-scaling. All Canada's colleges are extremely good at providing that kind of customized workplace training. We'll have to see what traffic comes from it.

[Andrew Saxton, Conservative, North Vancouver, BC]

Okay, thank you.

Now in budget 2014 we included the Canada apprentice loan program—a hundred million dollars in no-interest loans to help apprentices fund their living expenses while learning skills and getting the experiences they need to get jobs.

What is you opinion of the apprentice loan program?

[Nobina Robinson]

We were absolutely delighted with that initiative. We see ourselves as a key proponent of that idea. We presented it to your committee in the fall.

In brief, what I think is important is the philosophical change that the initiative makes. It treats apprenticeship as learning. Making the Canada apprentice loan part of the Canada student loans program gets at that parity of esteem issue that I was talking about. Whether you're a learner in a post-secondary credential or you're an apprentice learner, you are the same. You are part of our learning population.

Again, it's a pilot. We want to see it work. We have been working very closely with ESDC officials in providing ways to make it roll out as fast as possible.

[Andrew Saxton, Conservative, North Vancouver, BC]

Thank you very much.

My next question is for Mitacs.

You mentioned the Elevate initiative in your opening remarks. The economic action plan 2014 invested another $8 million into Mitacs over two years to help with programs like this. I'm interested to know from you how this investment and this program are going to help young Canadians get jobs.

[Robert Annan]

We were very pleased about the investment in Elevate. Really that's in response to something that was coming back to us from our industrial partners that we work with in our other programs, in Accelerate, for instance.

Essentially there are two parts to the question. The first part is that we were hearing from a lot of our industrial partners that were sponsoring interns through our Accelerate program that, while they appreciated the program—and in many ways it actually spurred investment R and D within the companies we were working with—given that most of our partners are small and medium-sized enterprises, they didn't tend to have the capacity in-house to actually manage research groups. So a small company that has a dozen employees may want to bring on two Ph.D. graduates to do research in-house, but they don't have anyone in their organization who could then actually launch the research group and tie it to the business needs of the organization.

We decided that we needed to find a way to train research managers. In some countries, like in the United States for instance, they have a lot of large-scale companies performing R and D. They have four times as many per capita as we have, so they spin out these managers. We don't have a mechanism, so what we decided was that this was a way to start training these managers—

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you. Just wrap it up very quickly, please.

[Robert Annan]

Yes.

The last piece is really the fact that we have an excess of post-doctoral researchers who aren't going to find faculty positions, so really it was a match of excess labour with demand.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Saxton.

We'll go to Mr. Brison, please.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

First of all I'd like to start on the issue of unpaid internships. If the federal government were to tighten and clarify its laws around unpaid internships with federally regulated industries, which jurisdictions should we seek to emulate?

[Claire Seaborn]

So far I've only seen unpaid internships in telecommunications, so really Bell Mobility, WIND Mobile, and radio companies. I haven't seen any evidence of unpaid internships in banks or transport, so that's really the industry you should be focusing on.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

So that's the only federally regulated industry where—

[Claire Seaborn]

Where I've seen them, but again we don't have any official data.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

But which provinces or what countries have taken steps that you believe we ought to emulate in terms of public policy?

[Claire Seaborn]

I think British Columbia's Employment Standards Act is the strongest example. They have interpretation guidelines that clearly explain that interns who are not working for academic credit are always entitled to minimum wage.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Those were the regulations under which Bell Canada was found offside?

[Claire Seaborn]

There's a company in B.C. called HootSuite, and it was found to be offside. It's a social media-based company. After it was called out it not only started paying all of its unpaid interns, it paid them retroactively for the six months prior.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Okay.

So which telecommunication firms are you referring to, then, in terms of federally regulated industries?

[Claire Seaborn]

Bell Mobility and WIND Mobile.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Ontario has recently introduced amendments. I think Yolen referred to Ontario's amendment to their laws to bring interns under the protection of provincial workplace health and safety laws. They've made more resources available for investigations.

Can you comment on how that's working out so far?

[Yolen Bollo-Kamara]

This is a very recent change. I think it's a really good start to ensure that interns have the same rights in terms of workplace safety. But what we'd like to further see from the Ontario government is that they're actually proactively looking into instances of unpaid internships just because they are pretty prevalent in Ontario. Currently, the government relies on a complaints-based system, which means that interns who aren't aware of the laws around unpaid internships aren't able to ensure that their rights are safeguarded.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Sure.

[Claire Seaborn]

I just have one thing. Just to clarify, Minister Naqvi's bill about placing workplace health and safety laws for interns hasn't actually passed yet. It's just a proposed bill at this stage. At this point in time students in Ontario are not covered under workplace health and safety laws, nor are they at the federal level.