Human Resources Committee on Oct. 4th, 2012

[François Lapointe, NDP, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

I will speak in French. Are you hearing the simultaneous interpretation?

Can we take it out of my time, please?

[Aleksandra Popovic]

Yes.

[François Lapointe, NDP, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Ms. Popovic, since the simultaneous interpretation is working, I will speak in French.

I am very pleased to have you here today. I have really had the good fortune to coordinate projects in new technologies with a number of literacy groups in the Chaudière-Appalaches region in Quebec. It was quite an education for me.

Could you please tell us what percentage of Canadians are not level 3 literate? These are people at levels 1 and 2 who have significant difficulty in understanding any written instruction in a work environment.

[Aleksandra Popovic]

It's understood that approximately 42%, so four out of ten Canadians, on average struggle at below level 3. Level 3 is considered the level at which you can cope with day-to-day tasks and manage as changes occur in your job and in your—

[François Lapointe, NDP, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

We are talking about close to 12 million Canadians. That is a huge number.

Based on my personal experience, I am convinced that a good portion of people who are seen as so-called "lazy" workers by some of my colleagues—and I am using major quotes there—are in fact people who have this problem. For them, the simple fact of going to apply for a job at a service station, where the cash register is really a computer, is beyond their reach because they do not have these essential skills. Imagine what might happen if these 12 million people had the essential skills needed to truly integrate into the labour force.

In your opinion, the efforts being made by Canada to bring these 12 million Canadians—or at lest 6 or 7 million of them who are certainly old enough to work—to obtain these essential skills, are they appropriate and sufficient, given this enormous problem? Are we really missing the mark when it comes to the resources to start to resolve the problem?

[Aleksandra Popovic]

I have myself witnessed some wonderful workforce and workplace preparation programming that does address essential skills.

Really excellent models are ones that are locally based. They take into consideration the community needs, the local labour market, the cultural elements, and the needs that surround individuals in terms of other supports to allow them to work. Examples of where this approach would be effective might be communities where individuals who would like to work cannot access appropriate supports for their personal, emotional, psychological, or physical needs. In some cases, this support includes being able to find adequate child care to be able to work on a regular basis.

Programs in workplaces and workforce programs in communities that link directly to the kinds of job-specific and technical skills needed in the local community tend to be a really good model. In other words, underlying essential skills are addressed on an ongoing basis and made incredibly relevant to the adult, because they are immediately applied to the work they are undertaking in their jobs or to the jobs they would like to compete for in their local community.

[François Lapointe, NDP, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Ms. Popovic, everything you have just told us is absolutely correct but, on the ground, I have only met high-performance organizations, people who are completely dedicated but also poorly paid. The instructors worked 40 hours a week for $15 an hour and helped 12, 15 or 30 people a week. These people were systematically underfunded and received their funding just one year at a time. They are making ends meet for 2012, but they cannot say if they will be able to continue the same activities in 2013.

Can we say that the problem of underfunding experienced by these organizations that, as you said, are so important, is generalized in Canada?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Could we have a short response? Mr. Lapointe's time is up.

[Aleksandra Popovic]

Indeed, this is a problem we do find. The very tight budgets, the annual revisiting of the budget, and determining whether or not programming can be sustained are critical issues for the organizations that try to deliver this kind of programming.

In workplaces, it's really important to have expert educators who can analyze jobs and determine what kinds of underlying essential skills are being applied to various tasks an employee must undertake. That kind of individual is critical, and to continue to fund both essential skills and literacy programs through colleges, through communities, and through trainers at large who are able to undertake this kind of work for employers will truly be a critical contribution to making an ongoing change to the underlying essential skills and literacy issues, both in workplaces and for any Canadian who is part of the workforce but is not working.

[François Lapointe, NDP, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

So this is a plan covering several years.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you for that response.

We'll move on to the next questioner, Mr. Daniel.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to both the witnesses for quite an enlightening view of what's happening in the education field, etc.

As I'm sure you're both fully aware, the responsibility for basic literacy and education lies with the provinces. Obviously, somewhere we're missing the boat in terms of educating people from that perspective.

Do you have any suggestions on how the federal government can work with private industry and the educational institutions to accurately communicate the needs of certain sectors for educational institutions?

[Andrew Cardozo]

Sir, I can go first.

Thank you very much for your question, Mr. Daniel

Certainly I think the solution lies in a lot of partners working together. From a federal perspective, we want to think about Canada as a whole in terms of having a competitive economy. When we're thinking about competition with China or India or Argentina, it's Canada as a whole, as a workforce, as an economy, that we look at in terms of competing.

The other aspect for the federal government to be interested in is the issue of mobility. Canadians want to be able to move from province to province, and employers want to be able to employ people from wherever they're coming from. Even though the federal government doesn't have a direct role, as you point out, in education and training, it certainly can have a convening role, and to some extent it has played that role.

Many provinces are very much interested in a national approach that would have the federal government at the table. Indeed the current minister of HRDC was at the meeting of the Forum of Labour Market Ministers for the first time a couple of years ago. That's a forum that had fallen away, to an extent. I'm glad to say that all the ministers, federal and provincial, see it as a really important forum for working together.

In terms of working with industry, Ms. Popovic mentioned the report by the Chamber of Commence. I think a number of the business organizations have become very concerned about and interested in the issue of skills shortages, especially in the past year or two, more than ever before.

Of course the sector councils, which I'm part of, bring together industry members with educators and government to work on these solutions. We don't deal with advocacy and we don't deal with advice that much; we deal with developing solutions, developing workplace learning, developing standards, and developing labour market information that is useful to employers.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Do you have any comments on that, Ms. Popovic?

[Aleksandra Popovic]

Yes. I concur with my colleague that the national convening role is a critical one, one where we are offering champions. We are able to identify and highlight for Canadians the kind of good work that is going on in the high-demand sectors, with employers who are putting workplace training to the forefront of what they do with their employees and supporting awareness around the need for continued and lifelong learning. They are moving forward in that way with the populations who are in greatest need.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

My next question is related to delving deeper into the unskilled labour force. The implication of what you have said is that our educational system is failing Canadians. One of the things that's happening is that because of the unprecedented skills and labour shortage, businesses are being forced to hire temporary foreign workers to fill these jobs.

Is that something that correlates with this issue? How do you see that picture?

[Aleksandra Popovic]

Are you addressing me?

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Yes—well, both of you.

[Aleksandra Popovic]

I think our education system is one of the strongest internationally. We do see a significant number of people coming forward with graduate degrees and so forth.

The interesting thing is that the learning that needs to go on in the workplace is slightly different from what might come through in the academic school system. I have seen numerous programs in community colleges that do a very good job of looking at what is needed in trades and skilled work.

There's a great effort by our educational system, but there is an entire layer of literacy and essential skills development that is the foundation and that supports any further education. For adults who struggle with literacy and essential skills, that is an important and different type of approach. That isn't to take away from our educational system, but it is to say that there is another approach and another type of learning that best suits adults who have gone through the system but continue to have low skills.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Mr. Daniel, your time is up.

Mr. Cardozo, if you wish to make a comment, go ahead.

[Andrew Cardozo]

I'll just briefly add a couple of points. I think Mr. Daniel points to a very interesting point about our educational system. I think in some ways our society as a whole is not reaching its potential. There are a certain number of kids who don't graduate from high school, but in Toronto, for example, 50% of the young people who graduate from high school do not go on to post-secondary education thereafter. That's a real concern.

One of the things we're doing at Alliance of Sector Councils is developing a curriculum for grades 11 and 12 so that kids who don't go on to post-secondary education are able to have some job-ready skills. That has really been quite effective and useful in terms of being able to make school more relevant and interesting to people who don't want to be sticking in school until the end of grade 12. Secondly, it gets them a job fairly soon afterward.

The other part we really have to deal with is changing our culture. Perhaps because we've had a public education system across Canada that is fairly well developed, employers have stayed out of the game of education. We've had a system in which the state deals with education and employers employ, and the two don't mix.

I think we really need to look at the two mixing and at more of a European model. There employers are actively involved in everything from literacy training to lifelong learning. As we have considerable technological advances happening in most sectors, lifelong learning becomes much more important, so employers have to be engaged in that with their workers all through their working career.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you, Mr. Cardozo.

We will now move to Mr. Cleary.

[Ryan Cleary, NDP, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Cardozo, I found one of the statements in your opening very interesting. You talked about how jobs don't yet exist for children in kindergarten, and I was thinking, when you said that, about how much of a challenge that must be for educators. I was also thinking about how there must be a real emphasis on the basics like math, science, English, French—the basics.

Then I heard your presentation, Ms. Popovic, and I heard what you had to say in terms of weak literacy rates, in terms of the 42% of Canadians you mentioned with low literacy skills and the challenge that deficiency is for employers in addressing low productivity and that sort of thing.

Mr. Daniel, when he asked his question, began with noting that the individual provinces are responsible for basic education.

My question is this: in the school system—primary, elementary, and high school—do students have the basics? Are our school systems doing the job?

[Andrew Cardozo]

I'll start. Certainly our sense is that while we do have a very good high school system and college and university system, a large number of employers find that when graduating students come to them, they might have a certain level of technical knowledge, but they don't have what are sometimes referred to as the soft skills, the essential skills that Ms. Popovic was referring to, so there are a whole lot of things.

They may have literacy and numeracy, but not have experience in computers or in working with other people—working in teams, for example—which are key parts of the service.

What we've been able to do as the Alliance of Sector Councils, as the voice of employers on human resource issues, is to convey to colleges and universities, and in some cases high schools, that what they are doing is great, but that additional things are needed.

[Ryan Cleary, NDP, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Mr. Cardozo, may I stop you there for a second? I'm not talking about colleges and universities; I'm talking about basic education. Maybe this would be better answered by Ms. Popovic.

When young people leave high school, do they have the basics?