They all dropped out of high school.
Evidence of meeting #29 for Finance in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was skills.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #29 for Finance in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was skills.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:55 p.m.
Conservative
Mark Adler Conservative York Centre, ON
They're all dropouts, right?
Are we trying to fit a square peg into a round hole? What I mean by that is that there used to be a time when you would go to university/college, you'd graduate, you'd go to work for a corporation, and you'd spend your entire life there. The transition from education to the workforce was seamless. Rather than looking at the educational system and how we are educating our young people, should we be looking at that process of transition, as opposed to the process of educating our young people? That is question number one, and I'll direct this in a second.
Has education now become a lifelong process, which can't necessarily be found in an institution as such, given that some of the most successful people we hear about today are dropouts? Everybody now has an opportunity to succeed without necessarily having to go the traditional route of being educated in a traditional way. Would someone like to take a stab at that? Just give me your initial thoughts, and then I'm going to move on.
Mr. Lewchuk.
5 p.m.
Professor, Lead Investigator, Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario, McMaster University, As an Individual
There are two things. Number one, I think the examples you give are absolutely right, but they don't represent the average experience—
5 p.m.
Conservative
5 p.m.
Professor, Lead Investigator, Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario, McMaster University, As an Individual
What we know very clearly is that those people who are getting the better jobs also tend to have the more advanced education. That's a fact of life.
But I think your second question is by far more important. Do we need to have a continuous role for education? I think you're absolutely right: that is the new world. We do need continuous education. It may not all happen in an institution like a university or a high school, but one certainly could imagine people moving out of the workplace and into training.
How we deliver that, I think, is quite key. I would say that one thing I am concerned about with our training programs is that they all target getting people from unemployment to employment. I think part of our training program has to get people from employment to better employment.
April 8th, 2014 / 5 p.m.
Conservative
Mark Adler Conservative York Centre, ON
I see your point, and point taken, but this youth unemployment issue is a global phenomenon. It's not just a Canadian problem. In OECD countries, the 34 countries that make up the OECD, there are 26 million unemployed youth between the ages of 15 and 24. In the developing countries, that number skyrockets to 262 million unemployed youth.
I don't know if any of you have read this book that I read a few months ago. It's called The Coming Jobs War. It's by Jim Clifton. I highly recommend it to all of you.
He talks about how we need to create more high-value jobs of the future and to get away from the traditional sorts of jobs that we've been creating, because if we don't.... The future of our countries depends on it. The future economic wars are going to be based on jobs, not on anything else. He gives Detroit as the best example of it. He says that our whole socio-economic foundation will deteriorate if we don't put more effort into creating the jobs of the future, not into still trying to produce buggy whips, if you will, because those aren't jobs of the future. Those are jobs of the past. That was a lot of the problem with Detroit, and now we see what situation they're in.
Could you comment on that? Mr. Gouda and Mr. Lewchuk, do you want to just jump in on it if you feel comfortable with that?
5:05 p.m.
Professor, Lead Investigator, Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario, McMaster University, As an Individual
I think you're right. We should be training for the jobs of the future. The jobs of the future are going to be less in taking metal and wood and bashing them into different shapes and more in taking ideas and concepts and thinking them through.
At the same time, though, I would be a little bit cautious, say, to write off something like the auto industry, where a lot of that metal-bashing stuff is now done by robots. The jobs of the future are going to be in designing robots and the software for robots, so you can still have that kind of manufacturing and still have some very good jobs.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Mark Adler Conservative York Centre, ON
Yes, of course. I wasn't implying that you weren't.... But has that led to—
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Mark Adler Conservative York Centre, ON
Thank you.
Has that led to sort of another problem? We've entered—and it was a while ago, it's not a recent phenomenon—this kind of self-service economy. You used to pull up in a gas station and a guy would fill up your car with gas. That was a job for a young person. Or you'd go to a movie theatre and the ushers were all high school kids. You don't see that anymore. All those jobs are gone.
5:05 p.m.
Professor, Lead Investigator, Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario, McMaster University, As an Individual
Yes.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Mark Adler Conservative York Centre, ON
You also talked earlier about young people and how their wages are lower. Would you not say that's because youth tend to jump around to jobs more often than older people do, so the trajectory of wages for younger people tends to slope, or to be a constant at a low level more so than it is for somebody who is an older person in the workforce for a longer period of time? That puts a downward pressure on wages.
5:05 p.m.
Professor, Lead Investigator, Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario, McMaster University, As an Individual
There's been a lot of evidence that in the first 10 years, yes, young people shop around. That's what they should be doing.
But I think what we're also seeing now is that the shopping around period can last longer. Before, it might have been five years. Then it was 10 years, and it could now be 15 years. I think that is the problem: there's just that much longer an apprenticeship period and—
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Mark Adler Conservative York Centre, ON
That tends to push wages down, though, doesn't it? So on the one hand to say that wages for young people are lower relative to wages for older people.... Because people are jumping around more often, it provides that downward pressure on wages.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
I'll have to encourage you to continue this discussion afterward.
5:05 p.m.
Voices
Oh, oh!
5:05 p.m.
Professor, Lead Investigator, Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario, McMaster University, As an Individual
Fantastic.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
5:05 p.m.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Thank you, Chair.
Very briefly, I was trying to follow along with Mr. Adler there about the aspect of the square peg and the round hole. To my mind, this isn't an either-or situation. We're talking about aboriginal youth, about unemployment and the barriers to getting young people into the jobs. Well, all jobs are the jobs of the future, because they're going to be done in the future, if you're a young person. As for the different aspects of whether it's working in a mine or working in the high-tech robotics sector, I feel that this is a false distinction that we're making here.
Mr. Gouda, you didn't get a chance to properly comment. In offering young aboriginal people opportunities, is not the greatest range possible? I'm worried that we could easily slip into this typecasting or narrowing of opportunities for young aboriginal people.
Maybe, Noel, you'll want to comment on this.
5:05 p.m.
President, Career Edge Organization
It's young people, aboriginals included, but basically what we do and what we have learned is about matching education and skill sets to jobs and careers. Some of what Mr. Adler referred to—movie-theatre jobs and whatever—are not careers. Those are just survival jobs, or part-time jobs, or whatever. It's once you come out and you have a passion because you've studied IT or HR, or whatever, or you're a skilled tradesperson and you're matching those skills sets and that education with what you're going to do.... Otherwise, you are disappointed. As I alluded to earlier, you either go back and live in your parents' basement until you're 30, and keep studying, or you take survival jobs. And the longer it takes to launch that career, the less likely it is that the career will be successful.
5:05 p.m.
Co-Chair, National Youth Council, Assembly of First Nations
I'll comment. I'll give you an example of my experiences back home. In Newfoundland, in Conne River, we have a system, a social program. We take welfare dollars and we put our people to work on our reserve, and we have 100% employment on our reserve. If they're not full-time employed, they're half-time employed, and part-time as well.
It gives you an opportunity to go and seek a job under welfare dollars in a field where you are willing to go ahead and study in the future, as a trade.... For example, let's say I worked as a youth worker for four years. If I want to further my education in the youth field, in an environment of some sort, our band, our first nations, will then provide me with the necessary training to put me to work and to further my education in that field. It can be any field you want: carpenter, millwright, plumber. I think having the opportunity to do that is a great asset for our community, because it builds a self-sustaining community, and a self-sustaining country, then, for our younger people.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
You have at least one more who wants to comment.
Mr. Kuzminski.
5:10 p.m.
Vice-President, Habitat for Humanity Canada
I've heard a few questions like this. Yours dovetails with this. There is the matching of skills and education to what's out there for employment. The other part, though, is where the government has greater challenges. Where do you make the interventions for the people who don't have skills, really for the youngest of the young? Where do you make the interventions that help them to have the skills that are going to eventually match to employment needs?
This is a plug for Habitat in one thing that we do. In Peterborough we have a partnership with an alternative school, where the kids are at high risk of going onto long-term benefits and possibly going into the incarceration system, the prison system, because that's the background. They are at high risk, and that partnership, the intervention that Habitat is making with the school, provides that dual credit opportunity to give them the skills they need in an area that's needed. This is trade-skilled. They're not necessarily the creative jobs of the future, but that intervention puts them on a path that has a high degree of return. It takes people out of the negative outcomes they would have and puts them on a career path to employability.