Human Resources Committee on Nov. 29th, 2011

[Louis Beauséjour]

What we're saying is that they are doing it now. I don't know when it started. I cannot speak of when exactly they began to travel in more remote areas, but that was one example that was working, in fact, in Nunavut.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

I guess what I'm sort of moving toward is that the success is fairly modest. When you're dealing with numbers in any department there's usually a million or billion attached to the end. I thought it was neat that you identified in your remarks that you went from three applications to 50 applications and that was by getting somebody out. There's a cost in achieving that success too in rural communities and it has been indicated before. Success in rural communities does have a greater cost factor. Could you give us an indication as to what types of increased costs we would have looked at and assumed you wouldn't be able to get that out?

[Louis Beauséjour]

I will not be able to provide that information.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

But you attribute it solely to people getting out of the office and getting into communities?

[Louis Beauséjour]

I don't know if it's only due to that. It's probably partly due to that. I don't know to what extent; it's only new.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Okay. I'm just trying to identify what would have been the rationale for the success and what would have been determined as a success, and of course try to get some of the costs around that. Could I get a little more information, if you could provide us with a little bit more information on that?

[Louis Beauséjour]

I can try to.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Okay.

I'm okay with that, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you for that intervention. I guess you could indicate there is a success there, but it would be neat to know what the cost of the success was and whether you might want to continue it.

We'll move now to Ms. Leitch. Go ahead.

[Kellie Leitch, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, everyone, for coming today. We greatly appreciate your time and the preparation of the documents for us today.

I think there's sort of widespread recognition that we're seeing this retirement of the baby-boomer generation as really a lead-up to what will potentially be labour shortages across the country, not only in urban areas but obviously in these remote and rural areas, where it is increasingly challenging to have people come to work.

I was wondering if each of the departments could comment on a couple of items, one being what you are doing to prepare to address this issue. The second is whether there are some specific skills or training programs you are looking at in order to try to build that capacity in remote and rural areas, programs that meet the specific needs of those primary employers in the communities in these remote and rural areas.

[Louis Beauséjour]

I can start.

Yes, I think we are concerned as to what the impact will be of the

aging population on the labour market.

We are already doing a number of things and we have to continue doing them. For example, we need to ensure that all Canadians can fully participate in the labour market.

To this end, a number of programs make it possible to target segments of the population that face particular hardships. For example, labour market agreements with the provinces concerning people with disabilities contribute to increasing their participation.

The opportunities fund is also available to increase the participation of persons with disabilities. There's also the targeted initiative for older workers, where we try to retrain or to keep older workers in the labour force longer, because that's part of the potential solution.

The other kind of programming that we also have in place is working with the provincial governments to accelerate the process for foreign credential recognition, to ensure that immigrants can fully participate in the labour market.

At this point, those are the initiatives I have in mind that we are doing to ensure the increased participation of people in the labour market.

[Kellie Leitch, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

Thank you very much.

[Allan Clarke]

Perhaps I could add a couple of things from the economic development perspective.

Back in 2009, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, the government released a new federal framework for aboriginal economic development. That is trying to realign how we work as a federal family, and come to ground on what our role is around economic development when it comes to aboriginal Canadians. It's recognizing that things have changed a lot over the past 20 or 30 years. I mentioned some of the things.

Demographics, obviously, is one of them, in terms of the number of aboriginal Canadians who will come of age, over the next ten years, to enter the labour market. You've got emerging first nations economies, whether you look at Osoyoos or Membertou. You can look at Whitecap Dakota and other places, where there are emerging economies that are becoming net importers of workers, in fact. You also have this huge growth in resource development that's having an impact, particularly on remote communities. You also have that demonstrable interest of the private sector to work with aboriginal Canadians, and to work with government.

I think the thing that's different now, which made it a bit different in the past, is the whole interest in working partnerships. Louis mentioned, as well, the number of different interests that are coming to the table now around economic development in a way that they weren't before. Some of that is driven by things like accommodation and consultation requirements, but I think there's also legitimate interest on the part of the non-aboriginal private sector, recognizing that there are going to be some extreme labour shortages in the future. As we work out this period of our economy, aboriginal Canadians are poised to deliver that. That makes it incumbent on us to start thinking about how we do this a little bit differently, not to be passive administrators of programs, but rather to link all the different investments that we have.

I think at this table what we're trying to do—and we work together when we're not in front of your committee as well—is look at things like how we link investments and social assistance to training and skills development, and economic development. There's a chief in Osoyoos named Chief Louie, who says that the best social program is a job. That's really what we have to be cognizant of, and the fact that it's the economy that's going to deliver the jobs. Whether you're in a remote community or a less remote community, it's going to be the economy that drives self-reliance and independence.

[Kellie Leitch, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

Thank you.

[Janet DiFrancesco]

I'm going to let Shane Williamson address this for Industry Canada.

[Shane Williamson, Director General, Program Coordination Branch, Science and Innovation Sector, Department of Industry]

Sure.

My colleague mentioned in her remarks that the knowledge infrastructure program funded 52 projects in communities with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. Seven of those communities were actually in places with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. This program funded infrastructure improvements at colleges and universities across Canada, and I could give you a flavour of some of the projects in the remote communities.

At the University College of the North in Manitoba, there was one project funded, but it actually supported infrastructure enhancements in 11 regional centres throughout northern Manitoba. At Aurora College in the Northwest Territories, there were three projects funded that built new community learning centres in three local communities. At Nunavut Arctic College there was a cyber infrastructure project that helped link up their community learning centres with their campuses and the research facilities in Nunavut. Also, at Yukon College there was a two-storey building constructed to house classrooms, computer labs, and mobile science labs.

So those are the sorts of projects funded through the knowledge infrastructure program that helped build the capacity to train students for knowledge jobs in the future.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

All right, thank you, Ms. Leitch.

We'll move to Ms. Perreault.

[Manon Perreault, NDP, Montcalm, QC]

Good afternoon. I would like to thank you for being here with us this afternoon. I would also like to thank you for sending written copies of your presentations.

My question has to do with the Aboriginal Skills and Employment Partnership program.

If I am not mistaken, there are significant delays from when the groups apply for funding to when they receive an answer. I am specifically thinking about the 54 Mi'kmaq students who submitted an application. They got an answer in November 2011, just two days before the beginning of the training.

What is the reason for those delays? Are they common?

[James Sutherland]

I think I may know the reference of the project you're talking about. That would be under the skills and partnership fund, which is a proposal-driven approach. We've run two calls for proposals so far. The calls greatly exceeded our expectation with respect to uptake. We received over 400 applications for access to our fund. The fund is $210 million over five years, until 2015.

That demand made it difficult to get though the number of them, which has meant that many projects, which maybe in an ideal world would have been processed much more quickly, in order to go through the entire assessment process have taken longer than we would normally accept or like to see. If your question is asking if that's the norm, I would say under circumstances without such a high demand, that would not be normal so close to the beginning of the project. However, under the circumstances in this particular instance I would say that many of the projects have taken much longer to assess than we would have liked.

[Manon Perreault, NDP, Montcalm, QC]

Those delays probably had an impact on the people who applied for funding.

Can you talk about the impact?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Just a moment.

Go ahead.

[Kellie Leitch, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

The direction in the questions seems to be asking about services, as opposed to focusing on the skills-development component of what this study is about. I would just like to ask if we could stay on topic, which is about being forward-looking in skills development for people in remote and rural areas.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Point of order, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

That was a point of order. It's not particularly debatable, but I'll hear you.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Just on a point of order, my understanding is that the presenters actually specifically talked about the skills program, and if you can't get the money out of the door, I'm not clear that you can actually enhance skills development. So I would argue that it is a relevant question.