Human Resources Committee on March 20th, 2007

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First, I want to thank our guests, who are testifying on a multi-dimensional subject. The first dimension I want to talk about is access to employment for marginalized groups, for example, immigrants, foreign workers—because some people come here to work for a specific time period without immigrating—aboriginals and the handicapped. It is my impression that, to date, this kind of access to employment has resulted in exploitation by employers and related organizations. In fact, we could have a charter on employment in which unions could agree to grant access, and so forth.

However, the labour shortages in some regions in Canada illustrate that we are ignoring a huge potential opportunity. I will talk about this subject, perhaps, with Mr. Hinton or Ms. Hicks, who talked about the handicapped, particularly those with spinal injuries. I know that the kinds of jobs that these individuals can do are obviously limited. Their employment profile is specific.

In order to ensure access to such jobs, do you believe that we should have positive discrimination policies for these people and other marginalized groups? Do you understand what I'm saying? There are often positive discrimination policies for individuals who are job-ready, but who are not handicapped.

[David Hinton]

Thank you very much for the question.

I would pose this as the first example. Who would have thought four years ago that there would be a quadriplegic member of Parliament? I think that has made a huge statement.

As to the reverse discrimination, I speak for the Paraplegic Association, but I believe that all people with disabilities want to be considered as mainstream, rather than separate and apart. Yes, there are accommodations that do need to be made. Employers need more education and awareness. The government itself needs some more education and awareness. But trying to set up a separate or reverse discrimination, I think, brings more embarrassment to the people with disabilities. I feel that they want to be involved as members.

Moving towards a disability act can cover some of those issues. Employers who are willing and able to hire people with disabilities have to face certain accommodations in the workplace, and some of them can be expensive. It can be everything from access to the building, to certain hours of operation, to the recognition of health requirements. When employers are willing to go that far and that much beyond what is required, then I feel there should be something in the way of government assistance for those agencies or employers. I believe that would tend to level the field a lot more.

It starts right with education, and goes from there. For people with disabilities, opportunity to get into universities, opportunity to complete post-secondary education, is much more expensive, is much more problematic. So I think it starts right from education upwards.

Thank you.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Thank you.

Now, I want to talk about literacy with Mr. Cousineau. You rightly pointed out that employment criteria are now more specific because of modern employment methods, technological methods among others. You also said that approximately 9 million job-ready individuals have level 2 literacy.

I'd like to hear your comments on the current policy. Yesterday's budget refers to an intention. However, last September, the literacy budget was cut. The $58 million budget was cut by $17 million.

Are these cuts appropriate under the circumstances? Do you believe there's an impact? If so, how does this fit with the desire to focus on literacy and enable you to fulfil your mission?

[Gaétan Cousineau]

Thank you for your question.

The cuts have had an impact, there's no doubt about it. A number of our members have not been able to provide or to continue to provide their services to learners. Above all, project approval has been delayed, which has also hurt. We are slightly more optimistic because it seems that projects will ultimately be assessed and approved.

Having the criteria change in mid-process hurt us a great deal. We had to re-submit or modify projects, which caused delays. The federation is still waiting for approval of various projects that we submitted based on the old criteria. We hope they will be approved.

Our challenge is to provide services in French to anyone who wants them throughout the country, in each province and territory. We have organizations and members who do so in all provinces where people have level 1 and level 2 literacy.

The gap between francophones and anglophones in Canada is significant, at 17%. The illiteracy rate for francophones is 56%—level 1 and level 2 literacy—and it is 39% for anglophones. The francophones need to catch up. There are many reasons for the gap, including history, but much work remains to be done here.

With regard to employment, many people who come to see us work, but they have limited knowledge and skills. So, they work in low-paying jobs, do not have access to promotions and so forth. These people come to see us, and we take care of them. Some of them lose their jobs and come to see us to learn the skills they need to return to the labour market. Furthermore, some people come to learn French or relearn French because they are losing their language in their minority community and they want to ensure that they can help their children who are learning French in school.

So, we are working with all these groups. Our work complements formal education because we provide an informal education. Adult literacy lasts a lifetime because we should be able to maintain these skills.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, and thank you, Mr. Lessard.

Madam Savoie, please.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Thank you for your presentations, which were very informative.

The further this study progresses, the more I realize that there are many obstacles for many Canadians preventing them from accessing training or post-secondary education.

Mr. Cappon, you provided very interesting statistics, but I'm surprised that our results weren't even worse, given all the obstacles. We are creating a lot of obstacles for Canadians.

My question is for Mr. Cappon. I've already asked you this question; and you answered, but your answer deserves repeating. You're proposing that we create national objectives in Canada, such as pan-Canadian targets or objectives. How does this fit with the idea of provincial jurisdiction, meaning without our encroaching on provincial jurisdiction? I know that my colleagues are very sensitive to this. I would like to hear you in this regard.

[A voice]

I'm eager to hear the answer.

[Dr. Paul Cappon]

Earlier, I gave two very specific examples. The first concerned Australia, with jurisdictions very similar to Canada's. In fact, the states are responsible for education at all levels, under that country's constitution. However, the cooperation and coordination in Australia with regard to post-secondary education is quite different from what one sees here in Canada.

The other example that I mentioned is perhaps a little more interesting for Canada. I am referring to the European Union, where all member countries are independent by definition. However, countries share common goals, goals that they adopted as a European society. Despite the constitutional context of the various independent countries, it's possible to adopt goals, to work together and to harmonize education systems and training systems at all levels.

For example, let's talk about innovation and productivity. The goal of each country in the European Union is to allocate 3% of GDP to research and development. In Canada we are currently spending less than 2% on R&D. Which of the two, the European Union or Canada, will achieve better results?

So, I don't want to hear that we cannot have common goals because Alberta is different from Nova Scotia. Denmark manages to work with Italy within the European Union.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

So, you are suggesting that we set objectives, but how can we harmonize these objectives? What mechanisms would we implement? We know that the provinces and the federal government each want the lion's share. What kind of mechanism could we implement?

[Dr. Paul Cappon]

Clearly we want—and this is our message—all the stakeholders to cooperate.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Yes, that infamous word!

[Dr. Paul Cappon]

It's much easier to say it than to do it, right? Nonetheless, it's true, not only for governments, but also for the stakeholders, university associations, college associations and others. Such cooperation is essential and we must adopt not only targets, but also measures. We need to know, as I said earlier, whether we are successful or not. Otherwise, the public will never believe that we will achieve what we hoped to achieve. So, first we need targets and then measures that are transparent and accessible. We need mechanisms to promote consistency and cooperation. In our report, we indicated that these three things exist in all developed countries, except Canada.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Thank you.

I have another question, if I may, for the CLC.

I've heard from some of my constituents who have gone to various employers to apply for jobs. They were told that employers had to advertise to meet the official requirements before hiring foreign workers, yet they did not want to hire anybody else but the particular foreign workers they had in mind.

I'm wondering if you'd like to comment on that problem. It has been brought to my attention several times. What does the budget have to say about foreign workers? The more I hear about the lack of investment in Canada in training and post-secondary education, the more I think that before screaming that we have a shortage, perhaps Canada should invest more in education and training than it has.

Would you comment on that?

[Hassan Yussuff]

I'll let my colleague comment, but I just want to make one point first.

The CLC has had a working group of affiliates from right across the country looking at this issue and sharing their experiences with what's going on with the foreign workers program and how it impacts every province. We've been doing some collaboration with the federal government on how we could address some of the problems.

But I'll let Karl give you the details, because this is one of his files.

[Karl Flecker, National Director, Anti-Racism and Human Rights Department, Canadian Labour Congress]

Thank you, Denise. That's a very good question, and it really gives considerable concern about the speed with which the government has embarked on its policy redesign, and about the government's budget, which makes references now to making every legal occupation in Canada available for a foreign worker.

The number of instances of abuse or questionable practice is enormous. To give an example, in 2003 the British Columbia trades council found that in the dismantling of a pulp mill, they brought in workers from India and from Thailand while 200 qualified workers were available within the region. The same council has been tracking numbers of unemployed electricians, 7,000; unemployed apprentices, nearly 8,000; journey-level painters, nearly 300; bricklayers, over 300, and so on. So there's a large number of qualified people who are available within the country or even within the region. What we don't have are labour mobility initiatives to put people who are qualified into those particular jobs.

In other cases, whereas there is a rush to redesign the temporary foreign worker program to be very responsive to employers' interest to have workers, there is not the commensurate interest to say, let's make sure we have strong compliance enforcement monitoring mechanisms to make sure these workers have safe working conditions, that they are in fact being paid the prevailing wage, that they're not being exploited, that we don't have situations of Mexican workers paying human traffickers, third-party recruiters, $800 or $1,600 a month to be able to come in and work for a particular employer; so we don't have situations where the agricultural farm workers are responsible in some cases for accommodation and they put 18 South Asian men in a two-bedroom apartment; or the more extreme and grotesque example that since the year 2000 a commercial vegetable farm just outside of Montreal has been bringing in Haitian workers to a blacks-only cafeteria, to facilities that do not have running water. That's since the year 2000, in Canada.

So the number of instances of disingenuous contractual relations with the foreign workers and blatant abuse is enormous. It's very disappointing to see in this budget that $50-some-odd million is going to be to open up this program to every legal occupation in Canada and that the path to citizenship for some of these people is going to be limited to only skilled workers. So are we going to be looking at a case where we're finding a large number of low-skilled workers coming to Canada, who may be interested in staying, but the path to stay, the arbiter of who decides if they're a good immigrant or good citizen, is the employer, not the nation state of Canada?

On the eve of March 21, 47 years of remembering the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I think one thing that's not been said within this context is, who are we talking about bringing in here? We're talking about bringing in people of colour from the global south. And under what terms and conditions are these folks staying?

So these are some very serious concerns, and at a minimum, we should be seeing strong compliance enforcement monitoring mechanisms in place before an employer has to go from advertising a number of weeks to a number of days. I think that's just asking for disaster on the scale that Europe, Germany, has experienced.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much. That's all the time we have and then some.

We're going to move to Mr. Chong for seven minutes please.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have a question for Mr. Cappon.

In your report here—I just perused it, and it's quite impressive—I note with interest that we have the highest, or above average, funding for students for post-secondary education compared to the OECD average. That was somewhat of a surprise to me, because the perception out there is that this is not the case. I'm not sure if you had a chance yesterday to hear our budgetary announcement with respect to funding for PSE. We've announced that we are significantly increasing funding through the Canada social transfer for post-secondary education and training. I think it amounts to some $16 billion over the next seven years in additional funding.

I'm wondering if you could comment. From perusing this, I know the report doesn't identify funding as the single most critical component. Maybe you could elaborate to this committee a bit more on what you mean by the need for better metrics for assessing performance, how that might work. Would that go through a council of ministers of education? What sorts of metrics need to be defined? How would that be coordinated?

[Dr. Paul Cappon]

Those are good questions. I'll try to respond to some of them.

Indeed, it is the case that in our report we deliberately didn't focus on the amount of funding for post-secondary education, except to say that Canada has always been quite generous in the amount of funding we've had. When it comes to inputs in that sense and other senses, Canada has ranked among the top two or three in the developed world.

One of our points, of course, is that if we're spending $30 billion of public funds and $7 billion of private funds annually on post-secondary education, we need to look at more than just inputs. We need to know what our results are. What are the outcomes from all of that? That is why we focus on comparisons with other countries: whether or not they spend as much per capita or as much overall as a proportion of GDP as Canada, what they are doing, and how they are doing it differently.

We had some concerns, as you see from our report, when it came to graduate student rates of achievement, particularly at the doctorate level; concerns when it comes to the few graduates we have in science and engineering; concerns about how much we invest in research and development; but most of all, many other concerns related to the labour market shortages we're anticipating and the fact that we don't have mobility across the country of workers.

We were just talking a moment ago about foreign workers coming to Canada, and under what conditions. Yet in this country we actually have restricted mobility of workers because of non-recognition of credentials across the country. In fact, we have the absence in Canada of any system of prior learning assessment and recognition that would allow people to be mobile from one province to another. There's also the issue of credit recognition between institutions.

Our main focus, as mentioned in response to Madame Savoie a moment ago, is that beyond having objectives that are pan-Canadian, in order to compete internationally we need to have measures—the metrics you referred to—to determine whether or not we're succeeding in achieving those objectives.

What are the metrics? We've actually set out in our report many of the metrics that would be necessary. I think in fact the next stage, with respect to your question about how that could be done, is to have an agreement among all the main intervenors in the system as to whether those are the true metrics. Is that what we want to use, or should we use different metrics? This would require agreement by levels of government, by associations representing the various institutions, by employers, by workers' representatives, and others, which is how other countries have done it at a national level.

Then I think we have to have agreement about the fact that we will take account of those measures or metrics, and of the achievement, in every round of funding we take as a country, because it's a social project.

Finally, I think we need to put in place mechanisms that are quite specific about how we're going to achieve that cohesion. I mentioned, for example, a moment ago the lack of mobility provided for in Canada for workers—and for students, for that matter. What mechanisms are we going to put in place to ensure that the mobility increases among provinces and between provinces? Those things are quite achievable. I think it's just a matter of political will.

As I said, with respect to the specific metrics, I think we've set them out. Our next task at the CCL is actually to bring these people together—Statistics Canada, Human Resources Canada, and others—who could agree on a consensus set of metrics, on the data strategy we need, and be able to say, from A to X, these are the priorities in terms of data, these are the things we need to know, and here's what it's going to cost for the country to know this on an ongoing basis.

I think that's how you provide for progress.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

In addition, I notice in your report that our biggest economic challenge is improving workplace learning. That is somewhat interesting, because the theme here is that employers are not doing enough to invest in training and the upgrading of skills within their own workforces, which is something that I think Roger Martin at the University of Toronto also focused on in his reports, in his study of the economy in Ontario and of why we weren't as productive as other OECD countries. He identified the same sort of thing, that employers were not investing to the same extent in productivity-enhancing plant and equipment capital compared with other OECD jurisdictions.

What sorts of things could the government do to encourage employers to invest in workplace training to a greater extent? Or are the tools already there for them to use, and it's just a question of a business culture, a business climate?

[Dr. Paul Cappon]

I'm very glad you asked that question.

The tools are not there. I would like to refer you to our Lessons in Learning publication, “Canada's biggest economic challenge: Improving workplace learning”, in which we set out the instruments that Canada would actually need to improve workplace training and education. It was put up on our website just this week as a matter of fact

You're quite right, employers are not doing their share in Canada. They do need some help from governments, but they also need help from employees. Again, one of the principles I mentioned a moment ago in my presentation is that workplace education and training needs to be co-financed, not by the state alone or by the employer alone, but there needs to be a partnership—which includes the learner, by the way, who will benefit individually from that process.

Martin was able to point out, as we've pointed out in our report, that Canada is well below the OECD average in every aspect you can think of in terms of workplace education and training, not just with respect to the amount of money per worker that's invested by employers and by employees, but also with respect to the percentage of firms that invest. Most remarkable of all is the fact that those people who need training the most are those who are the least likely to get it. People who are offered training are those with a post-secondary education, usually a university degree. The people who I think are referred to in the literacy context as having problems—the 42% who are below the bar in literacy—are those who will not get offered workplace education and training.

I don't think this is a very difficult area of policy to work in, actually. It's one of the easier ones with regard to post-secondary education, but we haven't given ourselves the tools to do it. I would be delighted, once you've had a chance to look at our appraisal of it and at some of our recommendations, to have a discussion with you about what the next steps would be.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

I apologize, Mr. Cousineau, we're over time on this particular round. I know you would like some comments and maybe we'll get you in on subsequent rounds.

We're going to move to the second round, which will be for five minutes each.

Mr. Merasty.

[Gary Merasty, Liberal, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Thank you.

I have a question from a first nation/Métis/Inuit perspective on employability, but maybe I'll give a bit of context before I ask a very simple question.

One of the things I realized in my past work is that you can't get an unemployment rate in an aboriginal community because in order to be unemployed you have to register somewhere. When you're in an isolated community, that's a challenge. I know in my area this is the reality, so we end up having to focus on employment rates.

The unemployment rate of non-aboriginals, pan-northern Saskatchewan, is about 63%, and the first nations employment rate specifically is about 28%. I asked an economist, in my previous job, to find out this answer for me. In order to get to 50% of the first nations population, what do we need to do? He came back with figures, after a couple of weeks, that indicated we needed to generate the equivalent of 585 jobs a year for 10 years just to get to a 50% employment rate.

Employability is a huge challenge in the aboriginal community, but they also represent a huge potential in a province like Saskatchewan. When I got that, I was thinking to myself that I have some students right now in grades two, three, and four. With determinants on educational success like housing, when you have 10 or 12 people per house, what's the impact on literacy, learning, health, and self-esteem? I'm thinking about those kids in grades two, three, four, or five who are scheduled to be in the workforce a few years later.

In the Saskatchewan context, 50% of the Saskatchewan population is going to be aboriginal by the year 2045, or earlier—and of the labour force, by probably 2035, much earlier. When I look at employability, post-secondary education, and literacy issues, which are key determinants of success, I look at a number of factors that need to be overlapped and to have a bigger picture taken.

We've all heard of Dr. Foot's Boom Bust & Echo. He wrote a very valuable document that the world has used as the baby boomers have aged. We now have an aboriginal population, and I can see clear lessons to be learned from some of these predictions, as we're seeing another baby boom in Canada of this aboriginal community.

My question is very simple. Do you think enough is being done? I'm not saying that as a negative on current governments or past governments, but in general right now, overall, do you think enough is happening to mobilize that population to achieve the rates of employability that I'd like to see, from a post-secondary context?

Perhaps the CCL and the CLC could comment on that.

[Karl Flecker]

The answer is no, not enough is being done. On the numbers I recall, a quarter of a million aboriginal youth between the ages of 18 and 34 are going to step out of the post-secondary education system with degrees. Is the corporate world ready to absorb these folks? During our royal commission, the Conference Board of Canada said it could only absorb 60,000 of those people.

There is not enough being done. What more needs to be done?

From a labour perspective, one of the things we are doing in the labour movement is recognizing what we need to change in the collective agreement process that will actually take a look at collective agreement language and be more welcoming to bringing in an aboriginal workforce. If we take a look at the shortfall we are going to be facing in terms of skills and labour shortages in the next six to twelve years, the only cohort in Canada that has a positive growth rate and has the capacity to address it is the aboriginal, Métis, and Inuit communities. From a labour perspective, from an employer perspective, from a community perspective, from an educational perspective, and from a collective agreement perspective, we need to double and triple our efforts at a rate that we can't do.

Bringing it back to the current context, I noticed a doubling of the ASEP program in the budget. It's great and good news, but it's not even close to the amount of investment in human resources and human capital that is necessary to deal with that. If we don't make a financial and political shift, we're going to miss out enormously.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Mr. Cappon, for 30 seconds.

[Dr. Paul Cappon]

Well, your diagnosis is quite correct. The human capital problem we have here will not be solved by immigration alone. We need to bring people with disabilities, aboriginal people, males who drop out of school, and basically rural areas into the workforce.

The good news about aboriginal employability is that when aboriginal people have degrees, they are as employable as anyone else, and it's been shown to be so. The participation rate of aboriginals in trades and community colleges is as high as non-aboriginals.

The bad news is that we have very little idea of what's happening, and I again come back to monitoring and reporting. In fact, when we released our report on the state of learning in Canada last month, we had a chapter on aboriginal learning. We also have a knowledge centre on aboriginal learning located in Saskatchewan, and it's a national knowledge centre. We could report very little about aboriginal progress in learning, because the data aren't there and the analysis is not there.