Human Resources Committee on March 20th, 2007

[Gaétan Cousineau]

It is a big issue. We have what we call early childhood, la petite enfance. We do a lot of work with that, because research has shown us, and it's well documented, that it is a time to learn languages. The best time is before you go to primary school, so we put a lot of effort there. For French youngsters, if they have to go to day care in English, it doesn't help them to learn their first basic language. So having French day care would be the best thing. And also helping the parents, when the child goes to school, to have enough basic education themselves to teach the child in French. That is also the challenge we face in the monetary environment.

We do offer it. Actually, in the west we call it family literacy. That's all we can offer right now. We don't have enough money or support to deliver adult education, which we should be doing. This is what we need across the country. Right now, we see a lot of French from New Brunswick and Quebec going to work in Ontario or Alberta because there is work there, and they need to follow up on their training and, again, find that training out there.

I just want to say that I do applaud the funding of post-secondary education. What I meant is that it doesn't help the clientele we get from among those six million people. We need to reach 58,000 adults within the next 10 years to make a little dent, and we don't have the money to do that. We have only 1% of that.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

I'll just say that FANE in Nova Scotia was very optimistic about the Liberal child care plan and the fact that it would actually have provided some spaces that don't exist for francophone parents. And they were very disappointed with the cancellation of that.

That may sound political. It wasn't meant to be.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

We know that there is no politics here at committee.

We're going to move to our last questioner, Ms. Yelich, for five minutes.

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

Mr. Cappon, have you ever done a comprehensive study of each of the provinces? I really believe that's the disconnect when you hear the comments about literacy and the problems with literacy. It seems that there is a problem in literacy from K to 12. I'm not going to go as far back as they want; I'm going to go to K to 12, because of what I've witnessed. I want you to tell me, first of all, if you have ever studied it comprehensively as you have here in this book. Do you have any statistics?

[Dr. Paul Cappon]

We do, actually. In all of the work of CCL, I should hasten to say, we don't do a lot of interprovincial comparisons, because we think it's more useful to look at Canada as a whole and compare Canada with other countries. But we have quite a few comparisons among provinces for K to 12 education, which are actually done mostly by those in my previous occupation, in which I was the CEO of the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada. I spent eight years there.

CMEC does standardized testing of students at age 13 and age 16 in all provinces and territories. It also does standardized testing internationally, comparing Canadian students with students in other OECD countries. Actually, perhaps to your surprise, Canadian students fare quite well in comparison with students from other countries at age 15, which leads us to the conclusion that a lot of the problems occur after people come out of school.

We've done some studies to validate that as well, and what we find is that the decline of skills among Canadians after they've completed education, whether it's school or college or university, is faster than in other OECD countries. That leads us to the conclusion that the problems are not necessarily mainly in the schools, but mainly in the workplace or in the community or in the lack of the culture of learning, including of resources, in the community.

I'm not arguing that the education system is perfect, but I think it goes beyond that.

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

Yes. I wouldn't want to go into it now, but I do have some issues with the provincial one that I think are worth looking at, before we come down too hard, where, I think, the federal government should step in.

I also wanted to quickly ask you, before I go on to my other questions, if perhaps to address trades and skills, we should be looking at—You made some comparisons to the European Union, especially in rural areas or not just rural. Perhaps there are many skills and trades that maybe should be introduced at earlier years, much as they are in other countries.

[Dr. Paul Cappon]

We have all kinds of models that will give us information there. For example, in Austria 40% of high school students are in vocational training programs. They have no problems with apprenticeships. They have no problems finding skilled workers for their particular domains, because they introduce that in the secondary school. But they do it through an industry-school partnership. Industry supports those particular apprentices coming from school. They find them places, because industry feels that it's their responsibility. In fact, in Austria, in the vocational system, industry actually designs the educational system for high school students in vocational programs.

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

I do think we have to look at it a bit further back.

I also want to ask Mr. Gruson here about the police sector. You heard Mr. Hinton and Ms. Hicks tell you some of their problems. What has your sector done? Have you thought about some of their problems and issues? What would you recommend? What can you do as a sector council?

[Geoff Gruson]

Well, a simple answer would be that clearly policing is seen much more as a fully able-bodied-person job, but often police people get hurt or injured on the job and can take on the secondary functions, more administrative functions, in policing.

It's a whole lot more difficult to have folks with a disability out in the cars doing the active police work on the front line. I think the issue around policing is that there isn't a single person, an aboriginal person, someone without post-secondary education, a person with post-secondary education—We're looking to recruit pretty well everybody's first-born into policing over the next five years, because we're potentially going to have a serious problem being able to service Canadians.

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

I just wanted to let our witnesses know that we are working on recognition of foreign credentials. There was just a pilot project launched in Saskatchewan, at SIAST. It's something to be reckoned with. It takes the recognition to the source country, and that's where the competency and some of the skills are assessed.

I don't have any time to hear the other side talk about what hasn't been done. Start watching what we have done, and then you will see that we are probably way ahead of the game.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Ms. Yelich, that's all the time we have.

I want to thank the witnesses for coming out today, as we get started back on our employability study. We appreciate your taking the time to be here, all of you. Thank you very much.

Mr. Lessard, I believe before we close up today, you have a motion on the table. Would you like to read your motion, sir?

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

We've got a vote in the next few minutes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

I believe we do have a vote. We'll listen for those bells.

Mr. Lessard, do you want to read your motion?

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

Yes. Mr. Chair, I will re-read the motion I submitted, because I think that some colleagues have not had the opportunity to look at it. We can then see whether we need to hold the debate tomorrow. I will reread the motion for our colleagues because I don't want to take them by surprise, because this is very important.

That the committee recommend that the government maintain, as is, the budget and format of the Summer Career Placement Program—

It now has another name, but it's the same program

— that the government transfer the administration of the program to the provinces that so wish it, and that a report of the adoption of this motion be made to the House as soon as possible.

It's not automatic, Mr. Chair. The motion clearly states, “the provinces that so wish it”.

In order to allow our Liberal colleagues to discuss this amongst themselves, we could stand the debate until tomorrow unless everyone wants to debate it right now.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Lessard.

I've got Mr. Chong and Mr. Savage. For those of you who don't have the motion, it is number 19 on there.

I will release the witnesses. You can leave. Thank you once again.

The suggestion, Mr. Lessard, is that we address this tomorrow. I would suggest that's not probably not a bad idea. We'll try to carve a little more time for that.

Mr. Chong.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I just wanted to urge members of the committee to vote against this motion. This program's currently run by the Government of Canada and it's money we have approved, that Parliament has approved, in this year and previous years from the taxpayers, who pay these taxes directly to the Government of Canada, and I don't think we should be transferring this program to any province. I think it should remain within the purview of the Government of Canada.

We have made some revisions to the program to make it better serve Canadians. We didn't think that money should be subsidizing Wal-Mart. In a substantial number of years past, the money had gone to for-profit private sector companies that didn't need the money, so we refocused it more on the not-for-profit sector, and it still will deliver services to Canadians. But we think it should remain a Government of Canada program and not be transferred to the province.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

This will be the last comment, Mr. Savage. We will deal with this tomorrow.

Mr. Savage.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you, Chair.

I would not support this motion as it's currently written, but I would be very open—and this is why I think an extra day is helpful—to some wording in the motion that brings the summer career placement program back to where it was, the Liberal program.

I would suggest that if the government wants to have any chance of our voting this against this, to bring this spurious allegation of Wal-Mart being the major beneficiary, which we hear all the time, but which I've never ever seen any evidence of—In my own riding, every single grant went to a not-for-profit organization that served the community. So unless they have some great information that they've been hiding, I think we'll have a good discussion on it tomorrow.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

We'll carve some time out tomorrow afternoon.

The meeting is adjourned.