Evidence of meeting #30 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was industry.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Robert Henderson  Executive Director, BioTalent Canada
Grant Trump  President and Chief Executive Officer, Environmental Careers Organization of Canada
Alain Beaudoin  Director General, Information and Communications Technologies Branch, Department of Industry
Shane Williamson  Director General, Program Coordination Branch, Science and Innovation Sector, Department of Industry

4:10 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Ed Komarnicki

Thank you, Mr. McColeman. Your time is up.

We'll move to Mr. Cuzner.

March 26th, 2012 / 4:10 p.m.

Liberal

Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS

Great. Thanks very much. I appreciate the clarification of the roles that Mr. McColeman sourced out there.

You had indicated that sectoral funding is going to come to an end. You said, they gave me 18 months to work toward it, and I don't know if that's any consolation to somebody on death row. But could you share with us just how that's going to manifest in the short period. You've indicated that you're out there tracking down additional revenue sources. What is the amount of your revenue stream right now and what are the impacts this will have in the short term?

4:10 p.m.

Executive Director, BioTalent Canada

Robert Henderson

Currently we have a two-arm approach in terms of the way that we operate. We certainly had a core fund through the sector council program, which is no longer going to be existing, but in terms of our labour market information studies and all of our products and tools that we produce, we do that through project funding through different branches of the government. Sometimes it's the sector councils. Sometimes it's FCRP. Grant has much more diversified sources in terms of project revenue, as we suspected.

In terms of our operations, a lot of those have not been put on hold. We have to continue them. But we have to ensure that there's going to be an organization that continues to be able to do those types of projects, or if it is apparent that there isn't, we have to make sure that there's a soft landing for the intellectual property that is currently being developed, so that any organization, such as the industry associations that we talked about earlier, would be able to take up that mantle. Currently, we're not at that stage, but that's what we're working toward—to make sure that this doesn't happen.

I want to get back to the other question, though. I just wanted to state as well that I think it is fundamental to the sector councils that those who are not plugged in to the industry and to the member associations and everything else will not survive, and I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing.

4:10 p.m.

President and Chief Executive Officer, Environmental Careers Organization of Canada

Grant Trump

If I can answer, I think some of the beneficiaries of this are not just industry. In the environment sector, we help governments develop good public policy through a variety of activities that we do. We help universities and colleges develop curriculum. We help provincial governments with school systems, and we accredit environmental high schools, for example, across this country. So we really do get in to assist the public. We help the potential employees and the new labour force coming in through immigration, aboriginal programs, and a variety of others, as well as employers. They do benefit from us. There's absolutely no doubt about it. And the public benefits from what we do with respect to environment as well, because it ensures there are people who are competent to do that particular work.

Our organization is a little bit different, as we began in 1992 and we were self-sufficient in 1995. Then we did get whacked, and we do receive, in order to develop these public policy issues, some infrastructure funding. But we believe that this is a partnership and industry will participate.

4:10 p.m.

Liberal

Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS

The industry, as Mr. Henderson said, has about 20% of the major players, but then they have a lot of smaller, mid-size start-ups. Would that—

4:10 p.m.

President and Chief Executive Officer, Environmental Careers Organization of Canada

Grant Trump

It's exactly the same for us.

4:10 p.m.

Liberal

Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS

Okay. I just want to shift gears here while I still have time.

Both of your groups, would you rely fairly substantively on HRSDC's COPS, the Canadian Occupational Projection System? Do you use that in your work going forward? You do?

Could you comment on that, because reading through the briefing notes I found that they provide the information, but it's from 36,000 feet, where they don't break down the types of engineers—mechanical engineers versus electrical engineers. It seems to be a big chunk of information that doesn't really give you a whole lot of detail, and then it's not broken down by region.

Can that information be provided in a better format?

4:10 p.m.

Executive Director, BioTalent Canada

Robert Henderson

For the biotech sector, essentially the bio-economy of the biotech sector is arranged in five clusters, which are regional clusters across Canada. So I would say if you asked me when I talked—

4:10 p.m.

Liberal

Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS

Are you able to glean the information? You're not. Okay.

4:10 p.m.

Executive Director, BioTalent Canada

Robert Henderson

No, and that is the single biggest issue because not only are they in five different clusters, they're often across different verticals. For example, in Saskatchewan, the cluster there is very heavily agrifood, agrifood-based biotech, and in Vancouver, for example, in southern B.C., it's very much smaller start-up research and development pharmaceuticals. It's very different.

So not only are there regional disparities, but obviously there are disparities along the different skills, along the different verticals within the bio-economy.

So to answer your question, yes, regional is one of the biggest issues that we face.

4:15 p.m.

President and Chief Executive Officer, Environmental Careers Organization of Canada

Grant Trump

Environmental employment is cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary. As a result, we employ individuals from a huge number of science, engineering, technology, humanities, and social sciences—from environmental lawyers and environmental physicians, all the way to environmental scientists and engineers. Therefore, to capture that data is exceedingly difficult, and COPS cannot do that. As a result we've created our own language in terms of functional areas of employment, and that is where people work—do they work in air, land, water? We look at those multidisciplinary skills.

To get that data regionally—let alone provincially—and to have statistical significance at the 95% confidence level would be very difficult because of relatively small populations in certain areas. Also, we are so dependent upon regulatory framework that if there is a new project coming out—whether it be a natural resource extraction project, a pipeline, those sorts of things—there's immediately a whole variety of environmental considerations and there's a huge amount of work tied to them. The ongoing activity after that is probably fairly small, so you may employ hundreds of people initially, and then only a few to do the ongoing environmental monitoring.

Canada has two things to deal with environmentally. One is our past sins—contaminated sites—and cleaning up those contaminated sites through the federal program FCSAP, the federal contaminated sites action plan, a $3.5 billion project of the Government of Canada, and Superfund in the U.S. The other is where we're going to go with respect to new energy efficiency and new environmental activities. While those old sins are not going to go away—it's going to take us a while to clean those up—we have to plan for the future to look at what those new activities are, and it's going to be an entirely new language.

4:15 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Ed Komarnicki

Thank you, Mr. Trump.

Your time is up, Mr. Cuzner.

Who's next?

Go ahead.

4:15 p.m.

Conservative

Kellie Leitch Conservative Simcoe—Grey, ON

Thank you very much for presenting today. We really appreciate it.

There's one thing, from the standpoint of correcting the record, on a comment you made, Mr. Trump. In my previous life I was an academic at two universities—the University of Toronto and the University of Western Ontario—and I recognize that people outside those environments may think it takes six to eight years to implement programs, but frequently we can implement them as soon as we see a need, usually within nine months. So I think the academic environment can be responsive when provided the right information by the individuals they work with.

This is specifically for you, Mr. Henderson, at BioTalent. You mentioned a bit about the skill shortages. Could you be very specific on what the skill shortages are, in very specific terms—in the engineering field, it would be a mechanical engineer, not just an engineer—and also region by region? There are, at least from my experience of being on the Genome Canada board and my experience with the National Research Council, substantive differences, and it would be helpful for us to have that sense on a regional basis of what the differences are.

If you have the information, that's great. If you don't, if you could provide it to us at another time, I'd appreciate it.

4:15 p.m.

Executive Director, BioTalent Canada

Robert Henderson

The bad news is that I don't have that information for you right now, or I should say, I could have it in some form, but it's outdated. It's four years old. The good news is that we're currently conducting a new labour market study, a scoping one, in Canada, across all of the levels and all of the regions you were talking about. So we will have more of that data by the end of this year, but not in any kind of timeframe that might be useful to the committee.

4:15 p.m.

Conservative

Kellie Leitch Conservative Simcoe—Grey, ON

All right, then maybe I'll ask a different question.

With respect to the programs that you provide for specific skills, and those skills that you've identified are short, you say you're working on old data, but you specifically said earlier that you were working on specific items now, so there must be some data that you have to provide you that direction. What are the programs?

4:15 p.m.

Executive Director, BioTalent Canada

Robert Henderson

Are you saying the programs that we're currently running?

4:15 p.m.

Conservative

Kellie Leitch Conservative Simcoe—Grey, ON

And how many students do you affect in each one of those programs?

4:15 p.m.

Executive Director, BioTalent Canada

Robert Henderson

Do you mean students, or job seekers? There's a big difference.

4:15 p.m.

Conservative

Kellie Leitch Conservative Simcoe—Grey, ON

Preferably both, because I would hope those students enter into the jobs that you would be providing within your field.

4:15 p.m.

Executive Director, BioTalent Canada

Robert Henderson

Yes, indeed. Currently, because we're not able to take them into the employment standards and because of the fact that we have to link the two—we have to both get the job seekers to use our online tools, and then have the employers register to hire them on that—it's very difficult to track. The point is, they come and get, for example, bio-ready labelled and take the GMP skills check for biomanufacturing, or they continue to take our language course if they're an immigrant or an internationally educated professional, and then they go on to get a job.

So it's impossible for us to track, unless that employer has done so within our portal.

4:20 p.m.

Conservative

Kellie Leitch Conservative Simcoe—Grey, ON

What are your numbers like?

4:20 p.m.

Executive Director, BioTalent Canada

Robert Henderson

Our numbers are exceptional. For example, for our GMP skills check we had over 27,000 downloads last year.

4:20 p.m.

Conservative

Kellie Leitch Conservative Simcoe—Grey, ON

Do you know how many of those individuals are employed in that field now?

4:20 p.m.

Executive Director, BioTalent Canada

Robert Henderson

No, we do not.

4:20 p.m.

Conservative

Kellie Leitch Conservative Simcoe—Grey, ON

Have you made any effort to create a tool in order to be able to do that, and how many do you know, based on that tool?