Human Resources Committee on March 27th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Thank you very much. Right on time.

Now on to our next witnesses, Mr. Bizzarri and Ms. Hill.

[Carlo Bizzarri, Program Manager, Ignite Adult Learning Corporation]

Mr. Chairman, members of the standing committee, thank you for giving Ignite the opportunity to share with you what Ignite does in Regina.

The Ignite corporation is a not-for-profit corporation. Our goal is to help young adults at risk become independent and self-supporting. We have been in existence since 1990. Our unique approach has to do with our business approach to social problems. What we want to do is to help these young adults move from dependency, poverty, and hopelessness to become self-supporting, independent, and contributing members of society.

Although our charter doesn't directly deal with first nations, we are extremely honoured to say that 90% of our clients are first nation. They come to Ignite of their own choice. They see value in what we have to deliver.

Ignite achieves its goals through training, healing, and employment. Like a business, we are open all year round. Each year we take 30 to 45 at-risk young adults from the ages of 19 to 30, and they're hired to work at Ignite. Their job is to learn—seven and a half hours a day, five days a week. Wages are deducted for lateness and absenteeism. Poor performance and chronic absenteeism are causes for dismissal from the program. We're finding that this approach prevents a lot of these young people from ending up in a situation of pain, such as jail or having to deal with the law. Our success rate is about 70% to 75% over the many years.

Let me tell you what the program includes. First of all, we have an academic component. We know that employers are not interested in somebody who doesn't have grade 12 or the equivalency. The second component has to do with computers. Computers are everywhere now. Anywhere you turn, you have to know about computers. The third component is business skills. They actually learn how to set up a company. They go through the whole process of raising capital, doing market research, coming up with a business proposal, producing a product, and marketing the product. It's an incredible program.

We also go through some financial literacy, communication components, and driver training. We have a superb mentorship program that is carried on by people in the business community. We also have a newer component to this program, which is health and wellness. This is based on the latest research by a psychiatrist, which basically says that most psychological problems can be tied to brain problems. We stress the importance of exercise and nutrition. We also help them get jobs and/or go on to further education.

What we do is not a band-aid solution. It's efficient, it saves the community a lot of money, and most importantly it helps these young people get some hope to be able to take charge of their lives and achieve goals. We see amazing things happening.

What happens to these young people after they finish the program? They become employees. They become small business owners. They are volunteers in the community. They become homeowners. They are consumers. They also pay taxes.

I don't want to take too much time going into all kinds of details, but basically that's what we do. It's actually quite simple. It's not complicated.

Thank you for giving me this time.

Mona, do you want to add something?

[Mona Hill, Facilitator, Apprentice Support Services, Ignite Adult Learning Corporation]

I'd like to once again thank you for inviting us to join you. We are much appreciative that you are interested in our program.

I'd like to refer back to a little earlier when Jeanette spoke about the “one person at a time” model. I'd like to say that we're in total agreement that this is the way to go, particularly with our client base. The young aboriginal adults who we serve and work with do respond to this type of support.

I am a support person at Ignite Adult Learning. By profession I'm a social worker and I have an open door policy. Each apprentice who works with us is able to come to visit me pretty well any time during the day, if they're not missing too much class time, in order to deal with specific issues that are barriers. There have been barriers in the past to them developing their education and being able to be employable.

Our nine-month program focuses definitely on components of reliability and employability. What we do is give them self-empowerment, including skills such as the health and wellness component of the program that Carlo mentioned. Another part of that is changing your thinking, changing through Pacific Institute thought patterns. Some of you may be well versed in the Pacific Institute's Lou Tice's teachings on being able to change our thinking patterns and move from the negative to the positive.

Another health and wellness component, which is an open book basically for our young people in the program who I work with, is on addictions education. Too many of them, unfortunately, have come from backgrounds where they have lived with this type of problem and the chaos addictions create in a young person's life. Oftentimes they have embraced it themselves, then tried to move forward and improve their lives.

This particular part of the program is extremely valuable for them, and all of those components of the whole make a difference in the end result of employer retention of the workers who graduate from our program. We actually have a community that supports us. There are investors who support us, who call us quite often to ask for employees, “Do you have someone because we love your employees”.

We have amazing support from our community here in Regina and from our investors. We have a wonderful relationship with our crown corporations, with Casino Regina, Conexus Arts Centre, Sun Life, SGI, and Yara Belle Plaine. They absolutely embrace what we're doing to help our young aboriginal people, as well as those who come to us who are not aboriginal, because it's open to anyone.

I think probably some of the barriers have already been addressed by our respondent from Edmonton, but I'd like to add also that there are definitely issues of lack of day care. There is terrible underfunding regarding living expenses. We are unable to give them minimum wage currently. The best we can do is a training allowance that actually amounts to $5 an hour, so anyone joining our program is not going to be able to do that if they are single young adults, because they can't survive. Oftentimes that results in their living in untenable situations in another home.

We have a young man currently—and this is not unusual—who has been couch surfing for the last few months in the program, who never knows where he's going to stay, because he's trying to stay healthy. He's trying to move forward, away from his past and places and people who would pull him back. This is a commonality across the board over the years with our clients, and in that regard, besides what Carlo talk about, these are the other supports that we are trying to give them in order to help them become successful young adults.

That's about all I have say. We're open to any questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Thank you, as well.

We will move on to our first round of questioning of five-minute rounds.

Monsieur Brahmi.

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Hill, I will come back to what you said regarding problems that are more related to social matters than to competency or education issues. You talked about addiction problems and people having insufficient money for shelter or food.

What programs could the government implement to resolve certain issues that are specific to aboriginals, more so than to the general population? Is there anything specific about first nations members in such difficult situations the programs could focus on? What do you recommend the government should implement for that at-risk population?

[Carlo Bizzarri]

Are you asking that question of me?

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

The question is for you or Ms. Hill. She is the one who talked about homelessness and addiction issues.

[Mona Hill]

We seem to be having a problem with communication here. Can you give us a minute and we'll get someone to help us?

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Can I just ask, was there any translation there for you during the questioning?

[Mona Hill]

There was some translation.

[Carlo Bizzarri]

It was broken.

[Mona Hill]

Our communication is not working.

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Okay.

Maybe you could direct your question to another witness.

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

In that case, I will put the question to Ms. Jules.

In your presentation, you said that the group approach was not working. Over the course of your career, you have noted that the strategy really had to be tailored to individuals, and not to a group.

Here is what I would like to understand. Let us take for example a segment of the population that has been unsuccessful at school and has had to return to the workforce. What specific obstacles do first nations members face that are not faced by the general population? In your opinion, how should programs be adapted or changed to take into account issues specific to first nations communities?

[Jeanette Jules]

It's having all of the agencies working together, not just the ASETS programs or any of the employment training programs. It's the social development departments within the communities, in the first nations community, and within the towns and cities. It's the education departments all working collaboratively together, because then you see that here's a person we need to bring in; they have no place to stay and they need extra funding. It's to ensure that everybody's working together, instead of having an agency say, “Well, we can't use and you can't use the funding for this, and you all can't work together, because you're breaching your contract, and if you're breaching your contract then we're going to cut your funding.” Because that's what people are being told.

A lot of the younger people—and it's the same with a lot of the older ones—have a difficult time getting through school. Then when they get through school, they find out that where they've graduated, they haven't graduated with the Dogwood Diploma, or whatever they call it across the province. They've graduated with a leaving school certificate, so then they need to bring their skill level up.

One of the things that we've done in Tk’emlúps is that we've worked with industry. We've worked with the AMTA program and our education program from the two communities, Tk’emlúps and Skeetchestn, to get a skills training program. But it's an education program to get them to a grade 12 level, because a lot of our people are not at a grade 12 level and that's what you need to get into a job or an education. They're at a grade 8 level.

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Okay, that's five minutes.

We're on to Mrs. McLeod.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Unlike the east coast, of course, we have witnesses here who had to leave flowers from the west coast to join us today.

But, anyway, I'm going to start with the B.C...I didn't realize the name had changed.

I actually want to probe...and I think it's a very important thing to probe, and I really need some frank conversation around it. I've been a supporter of the program when there have been challenges around funding models that aren't there already. We have had some witnesses who have suggested that there's duplication with the ASETS holders, and we've had some who have suggested it's complementary. We had another program here through SPF that was fishing up in the north, and it seemed to have some pretty significant positive results.

So can you talk about that whole overlap issue or complementary duplication? I think that's one of the challenges that we're going to deal with as a government.

[Laurie Sterritt]

That is a reality on the ground that our team faces every day because we are delivering services around the province of B.C. There are two issues. One is an administrative issue. For each program, whether it's an ASETS or another SPF or another provincially run program, the way that success is measured is not always complementary.

For instance, if we work with an organization and we each spend $5,000 on a candidate, only one organization can measure the result. If that person gets employed, it might show up only on the other organization's results line, so it looks like we spent $5,000 and it didn't go anywhere. I think that is being addressed on an administrative level in some places.

The other issue is more a human issue, and it is a willingness to be creative and find ways to work together. The way we do that is that in more than 50% of our partnerships around the province, we're successful in working with other ASETS holders or SPF holders. We try to find out what issues individuals are facing and what you can cover and what we can cover and whether we can split the results, if that is an issue.

If we have a cohort training program—say we run an environmental monitoring program and there are 15 students—we each invest in certain aspects of the program. We bring partners in to invest in the program and then we would say seven or eight results would show up on our books and their books when those candidates get employed.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Could you give me a specific example of a partnership you've had with an ASETA holder, what you've done, and what the other person has done, and then in the minute or two that we will, hopefully, have left, can you talk about your specific recommendations to government regarding how you see that we should move forward to really get the best outcomes for the expenditures that are put in?

[Laurie Sterritt]

The way I have seen this roll out is that a number of silos compete with each other. I would say that if we can—as Jeanette has recommended—work together and find a solution that works in a broader sense rather than on a community-by-community basis, then I think we might take the competition out of it. Frankly, we work with post-secondary educators who are also in competition to fill seats in their environment.

It's not as though it's going to go away, but if we were all able to sit down and plan things out with solely a view to the successful result for the student, I think it would benefit the bigger picture greatly.

I don't know if that answers your question.

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

You have thirty seconds.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Just quickly, could you give an example of what the ASETS provider has done, when you've worked in a partnership, and what you've been able to bring to the table? That will probably take more than 30 seconds.

[Laurie Sterritt]

In some cases, the ASETS holder might fund the training allowance or the child care, and we would fund the tuition. We would provide the coaching. They might provide the essential skills upgrading. It totally depends on the situation. It totally depends on that other service provider and what they're willing and able to do.

Sometimes we're all multi-funded from provincial sources and federal sources and private sources, so we have to be creative in how we apply those funds. My message is always that we're stronger together and we're better off sharing our resources. If my $10 and your $10 equals $25, we're all going to be a lot better off.

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Thank you.

Mr. Cuzner, you have five minutes.

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

Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.

I thank the presenters.

I have a comment first. The guys from Goldcorp the other day said, we're “miners and not educators.” When they get somebody who comes to make an application, the key ingredient is what you folks are doing on the ground to prepare those workers so that they are successful. One of the unfortunate parts of the committee not being able to travel is that it would have been excellent to get on the ground and see what's taking place on the ground and why you guys are experiencing the success.

The other thing I wanted to comment on, Jeanette, is the comment you made that it's not being equal to everybody. That's important. I know even Nova Scotia Community College has gone to a self-directed approach to teaching where you're fair with people, but you're not the same. You're not just sort of teaching en masse. I think that's where we have success.

Laurie, you referenced something a couple of times. We saw some of the barriers and people have shared some of the barriers: financial, public school preparation, and that kind of stuff. But you had talked about fighting the assumptions. You made that comment three times in your presentation about the assumptions, and that would be I think an extrinsic assumption. Could you comment on that and how you've come about addressing it?

Ms. Hill, you talked about changing the thinking.

Are you guys linked up there?