Human Resources Committee on May 15th, 2014

[Cammie Peirce]

I think mobility has to be voluntary and it can't be at the expense of.... It doesn't make sense if you have a two-partner family where one partner will have to travel across the country or will have to leave their neighbourhood to work.

Something that would offer the opportunity for mobility across the country, I think, would be to have recognized certificates where we don't have certification now. For example, in skilled trades in the different provinces there are different levels of certification that are not common. Maybe what we should be doing is looking at a recognized common certification that would allow people to move across the country, without having to retrain to go to work in a different province.

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

Okay.

Keeping skills current is an aspect of training that we often forget about. That's especially true for the software sector. People show up for an interview knowing about software that's 10 years old but that's completely different from the current version. As a union, you're in touch with workers, including those who have lost their jobs. I'm talking about people who, in some cases, are older and are trying to get back into the market or just stay in it.

What recommendations do you have in the context of the Labour Market Development Agreements to make sure that additional funds are allocated not to basic training, but to upgrading skills around software and technology used in the labour market?

[Cammie Peirce]

I agree with you. I think there needs to be some flexibility built into the program. If you've been working for an employer for a significant length of time, your skills may not be current outside of that workplace, which means that you need that kind of upgrading. I think that's something we need to make available and if we can build on existing skills to help workers get re-employed, that's a positive. That flexibility does need to be built into the system.

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

As we've seen, over 60% of unemployed workers don't have access to employment insurance benefits.

Some people can get back into the labour market easily enough because their training is quite recent or some other reason like that. These people are more likely to be the ones upgrading their skills.

Can you give us some examples of people who have a much harder time getting back into the labour market?

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Give a quick answer, please.

[Cammie Peirce]

There are a number of difficult cases to reintegrating. We all know that older workers who have been long-time employees are difficult to reintegrate into the workforce. There are also workers who have been out of the workforce and have done child-rearing who are coming back into the workforce, and have had that gap between their periods of employment. It is difficult to reintegrate those people into the workforce, because they lack the skills and lack the supports.

In addition to that, there are a number of workers who go into the workforce who have not necessarily taken training before they went into the workforce. They went directly from high school into the workforce and have ended up in part-time, insecure, precarious work. They are not accumulating good hours and are not going to get employment insurance payments when they lose their jobs, because they're doing contract work. They have a difficult time being re-entered into the workforce.

The other problem we have is people who have been laid off long enough to exhaust their EI, who can't afford to take training, who have been unable to find employment because they don't have current or up-to-date skills and the opportunity for getting training didn't arise, or they weren't aware of it until they had been laid off to the point where they don't have income security.

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Thank you, Ms. Peirce.

That ends our rounds of questioning.

We want to thank the witnesses first of all for coming in and assisting us in this study on the LMDAs as we move forward with it.

Thank you for taking the time.

Committee members, I'm going to suspend, and when we return, we're into committee business. I know that our agenda doesn't show it as in camera, but it has been our tradition, so we'll come back in camera.

[Proceedings continue in camera]