Finance Committee on April 1st, 2014

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

I suggested that this might be the case and one of the guys piped up almost immediately and said, “You're bleep right. I told my kid”—and this guy was a guy who had a good trade—“you're not going to do this. You're going into police foundations.”

I want your comments on how possibly we're competing against very valuable services, but the private sector can't compete with what we pay these people. Is that maybe part of the problem as well? I'm not quite convinced it's all gravitating to the universities.

Anybody...?

[Denise Amyot]

I'm not sure I understand what the question is here.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

From what I'm hearing and what we heard in previous—

[Denise Amyot]

Yes.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

—testimony as well, in the high schools, kids are encouraged to go to university. I'm not convinced that's the whole story. I'm wondering if you are seeing maybe young people gravitating to...even in the colleges where the public sector is able to pay them much more money, or the private sector, those trades you're talking about.... So the very people who would normally take those jobs are gravitating to these other public sector jobs. Are you seeing that in the colleges at all?

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Just a brief response....

[Denise Amyot]

I think everything is a question of exposure, what you see. There are very good programs right now in colleges where you can go for a year and you try four different trades. It's especially good for youth who are not sure of what to do. Unfortunately, the youth have to decide often in grade 10 what they will do, and they cut themselves off mathematics and science. My nephew is a prime example of that. He wants to become a fireman, but—do you know what?—he needs to have his biology. He doesn't have his biology so he decided to go into communications. He would be a great fireman, but he is not pursuing it because he doesn't have the basic skills, unfortunately, in science.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Van Kesteren.

We'll go to Chairman Wallace, please.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and it's “chairman” because I'm a chair of another committee, not for any political reasons.

Anyway, I'm happy to be here today. I have just a couple of questions.

I'm in a different spot that Mr. Cullen is. I have a recent graduate. She did a co-op program at the University of Ottawa, a B.Com. She actually turned jobs down, to be honest with you. She has a job she doesn't like and is looking around still, but anyway, she's well paid.

What surprised me the most as a parent...and I wasn't one of the parents who said they only had to go to university. We tried to encourage them to do other things, but they're very focused young ladies. I have another one at school in the United States who pays $30,000 just for the pleasure of going there. I'm already at the $120,000....

The fact is that the cohort who she graduated with—a lot of them graduated last year, but because she was in co-op, she was longer—had no idea what jobs were actually available out there. They were somewhat lost, and they were all pretty smart young people.

One thing that I have done, as a member of Parliament—and I just started it, based on this—in my newsletter that I do every quarter is what industry is looking for people. I did health laboratories, for example. I did the marine industry, particularly on the Great Lakes. I know my friends across the way will be mad at me, but I did the nuclear industry because there are lots of jobs in the nuclear industry, and there are a variety of skill levels and educational requirements.

Is there something that the government could be doing, since we're not hearing it from parents and we're not hearing it from high schools, and so on, to be better promoting what industries have potential for jobs? I have a company in my town, Evertz Microsystems. They have job listings of opportunities that are as about as long as my arm. Now, they're all high-skilled tech jobs, but I talked to a young guy who got one of those jobs. He's 28 years old, and he's going around the world selling their equipment. Now, he has to be an engineer and he actually does some design work for them, too.

But my question is this. What are we doing wrong or what more could we do, as a government, to help promote where the opportunities are? Does anybody have an answer to that?

Yes, Brent. I was a student council leader, a University of Guelph president there, and we were part of CFS at the time, so there you go.

[Brent Farrington]

Actually, back to the first question that I was asked about what the Canadian Federation of Students is doing in this area, we've actually consulted and worked quite closely with the government. They are already launching an online portal that will forecast, show job vacancies, openings, projections of where salaries will be over the short term. That's great for providing that information.

I would, however, use the line that I used when I was working with people from the ministry working on that project: be careful about moving too closely into the planned economy area, because you do see a problem where, if you're promoting one specific area very heavily, as Bonnie had pointed out, it results in a glut, essentially. There are a lot of people who go into that field, and then we have all of these vacancies and shortages in a variety of other areas.

I don't think there's a silver-bullet answer to it. I do think that providing that information is great, but having the caveat there that a diversity of offerings is important. I think the government's actually moving in that direction.

[Sarah Watts-Rynard]

I would say we've made it so that we say to our kids, “You can be anything,” but “anything” is too broad. There's not a sense of what that means. What do I need to be doing today that prepares me for anything? I do think that it's important to say to kids when they're young, “Science prepares you for all of these opportunities. Engineering prepares you for the trades. This is what math is good for.” It's not enough to sit somebody at a desk and give them formulas to learn. They need to know why they would want to know that and how it might be applied.

I don't think we give enough of that. Quite frankly, guidance counsellors don't have a lot of time in the course of a day to provide guidance about career opportunities. They're worried about a student who is in a situation where, I hate the teacher, I'm not showing up. They're dealing with problems. They're not dealing with the kids who have any opportunity available to them to give them good information.

[Dr. Bonnie Schmidt]

I'll just tell a story of an epiphany on how we can get the information out.

Just a few months ago I was in Calgary. About 600 kids were in the audience and I had put up a chart that we had created as part of our recent spotlight on science learning report. It was a series of top 10 jobs that were taken from the public area, from the U.S. and Canada. They were somebody else's top 10 jobs. So if you can imagine a matrix of 80 jobs all categorized by others.

All we did was colour code them. Green, if it was a STEM job; blue, if it was a skilled trades job where you benefited from the STEM skills. When I put it up, there was a collective gasp from the audience because over 70% of the jobs were colour coded. The kids left just saying, “I had no idea that what I'm studying now in grade 10 is actually opening these doors.”

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Wallace.

We'll go back to Monsieur Dubé.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to continue by talking about underemployment.

Earlier, we heard a discussion about whether the term is legitimate or not. However, that is the term the government is using to refer to jobs that do not match the skills of the people taking them.

I would like to ask all the witnesses—the student associations probably have a clearer vision of this—whether there are any studies that show that more and more people are forced to take jobs that do not match their qualifications. Is underemployment really a problem?

[Tierry Morel-Laforce]

It is something we see especially among students completing their graduate studies, students with a master's degree or a PhD, who are often overqualified. That may be the result of universities pushing them to produce more and more research.

For instance, a master's student has to currently do as much research as a PhD student to graduate. As a result, they will be overqualified during their graduate studies.

It is no easy task to analyze this issue and there are not many studies on it. However, some studies have been conducted. We have briefly addressed the issue previously, but I am not able to give you a definite answer on it.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

The other question—

[Brent Farrington]

No, absolutely. In fact, there is a great study to highlight it from TD Economics on this area. I said it in my remarks, but $23.1 billion is the projected loss of wages due to underemployment and unemployment for youth.

That is a based on a combination of factors, but the primary focus of this study, and I encourage committee members to look it up, was the lack of adequate employment in a variety of areas and how those skills that people were trained in were being lost, and with the opportunity lost, what the cost to commodifying that into a dollar value would be.

[Denise Amyot]

I just want to add one thing. What is important is that youth, when they start to go into a program, no matter which one it is, they need to know what the expectations are, what is the expected outcome for them, what is the salary that they may have, and what is the likelihood for them to have a job.

I want to refer back to the questions with respect to labour market information because this would prevent what you're talking about.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

The comment I am hearing refers to the bigger picture. It seems that universities and labour market training are being contrasted.

[Denise Amyot]

They are complementary.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Okay.

Many of the comments I have heard are biased.

Are you telling me that underemployment exists because students are not making the right choices in their careers?

[Denise Amyot]

I would say that it is because people are not well informed. It really has to do with ignorance.

Whenever I say that colleges now offer four-year programs, people are amazed. When I say that colleges have applied research, people are amazed. When I say that colleges now offer higher education programs, people are amazed. It is ignorance, plain and simple. People have very little information. They also do not know that there are a lot of pathways between colleges and universities, and vice versa.

Colleges are no longer what they used to be 40 years ago. They have changed a great deal. Unfortunately, people don't know that.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

That is interesting.

When we talk about underemployment, we can also relate it in a way to unpaid internships. Mr. Franklin talked about the issue and I would like to hear more about it.

But first, I would like to speak to Mr. Morel-Laforce.

There have been many high-profile cases elsewhere in Canada. Is that also a problem in Quebec?

[Tierry Morel-Laforce]

Yes, absolutely. That is certainly the case in teaching, which is not surprising. Teachers have to do compulsory unpaid practicums. However, they are not the only ones doing that. Nurses and psychologists also have to. PhD psychology students have unpaid placements. That is a problem. In many cases, they receive the same workload as professionals. It is true that they do not have their degrees yet. But the fact remains that they are asked to do the same amount of work as professionals, sometimes with supervision but sometimes without. In addition, they are not compensated accordingly. But that's important. They are doing the same tasks. I agree that they should not receive the same salary. That's obvious. However, adequate financial compensation should be provided for those internships.

[Brent Farrington]

Yes, and I would echo beyond that. The federal budget attempted to identify problem areas and propose apprenticeships, but it did it in a weird way. Instead of offering grants to students, it offered loans directly to the students themselves and that was very unfortunate because it reinforces the debt sentence that students are graduating with and prevents them from gaining the training they need, because they don't want to take on additional debt.