Industry Committee on Feb. 7th, 2013

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

Am I up?

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Yes, we're quite a bit over your time.

We now go to Mr. Stewart for five minutes.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

I'm going to talk a little bit about recruiting foreign engineers to come in to fill gaps for companies. You're saying that the pool is drying up a little bit as China and India retain their engineers, and it's harder and harder to recruit people to Canada. Is that largely what I heard? Correct me if I'm wrong, please.

I'm wondering about recognizing the credentials of folks who are here in Canada but failing to have their credentials recognized. I know when I go door-knocking around my community that I run into lots of folks who have had training in other countries, and they're driving taxis and doing various things like that.

Is there some kind of collective effort? Perhaps Ms. Carter can take this question. What could we do at the federal level to speed that up a bit, or to help draw from that pool more effectively?

[Marie Carter]

We've done quite a bit of work to find out why self-declared engineers haven't actually gone to get licensed. A big part of it is that they need to get a little bit of Canadian experience at least in order to understand the business culture. It doesn't have to be experience gained in Canada, but it needs to be a Canadian business culture type of experience.

We found when we did our study that the vast majority of immigrants moved to a location because of family or some sort of a community connection. Those aren't necessarily in locations where their particular set of skills is needed. I got a call from a marine engineer in Regina. We worked through it.

I know that for the last six or seven years annually we've had 5,500 engineers coming to our regulators' doorsteps to apply. The vast majority of them, something like 90%, get licensed. A lot of what we're seeing are people who haven't acquired licences because they didn't want to move to where the job was—away from their community and from their family—so they've chosen not to pursue the field, or they're not in fact engineers, or they don't know that they need to get licensed. One of the things we are trying to do is to make sure that people understand who they need to go to in order to get the process going.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Would you say that my perception is a myth, in a sense—that there's not this pool of folks who have this great training but who just can't get their credentials recognized? Should we move on to another policy area?

[Marie Carter]

I'm not going to say that it's a myth, but it might be a little bit exaggerated.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Can you provide numbers? Could we get numbers from you on that, or from the report that you issued?

[Marie Carter]

We know how many people come to the doorsteps. We don't know how many people enter the country and declare themselves as engineers.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Would you have information on why they were rejected or those types of things?

[Marie Carter]

Do you mean on why they didn't get licensed if they went to the doorstep? Absolutely.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

It would be perfect to have help in that area.

I was just going to turn to Mr. Gamble and ask about the role that basic research plays in your industry. We heard from the pharmaceutical sector, for example, that 54% of their patents are based on peer-reviewed research. If you're thinking about things that are supplied by basic research like peer review, how do those affect the companies you represent?

[John Gamble]

First, our companies are like professional service firms. We don't have inventory. Our assets are people whom we charge out. In a cost-competitive market, it's often difficult to do in-house research, because you can quickly become very un-cost-competitive. That's not to say it doesn't happen, but it is a challenge.

To be quite candid—I don't mean to sound glib—one of the biggest barriers to innovation, at least to a sector of our membership, is government procurement, largely because it's very price-focused, and even though Treasury Board directives say “value”, sometimes at the bureaucratic level it's much easier to defend an empirical decision than a value-based decision. As a result, often we see a lot of price pressure, meaning there's not a lot of incentive to grow the scope of the project or propose alternatives and still be cost-competitive.

Second, there's an enormous amount of risk transfer onto our members, particularly by government. Therefore, if they try anything new or unproven, they're asking for trouble.

Third, at the end of the day, if you accidentally invent something, most government contracts stipulate that the government owns all the intellectual property. That's not in every case, but in most government procurement and certainly in the standard stuff we do for Public Works and Government Services, Defence Construction Canada, Correctional Service of Canada, and others, it's a disincentive to doing anything new or creative.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

I let the answer go over a bit because it certainly benefited everybody.

This now marks the last questioner in the five-minute rounds, and then we're going to go into a third round. I'll just advise the opposition that because the last speaker in this round and the first speaker in the next round are Conservatives, if it seems like a long time, it will be because two five-minute rounds are together. Two times five is 10.

Go ahead, Mr. Lake.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

Thank you to the witnesses for taking the time to come. This has been an interesting meeting for me.

I'll start with Mr. Gamble.

There's been much discussion about this gap in a specific demographic because decisions that were made when trying to balance the budget about 17 or 18 years ago are having lasting ripple effects today. It seems as if a lot of the challenges you're talking about are related to decisions made that long ago. Are there lessons to be learned for government now as we move forward, based on that experience?

[John Gamble]

I think the stimulus program was one of the great things that happened, and I have to give credit to Minister Baird. He never said this program was a strategic infrastructure investment; it is a job creation program. It did allow us to bridge until there was a certain bounce-back to the economy. It allowed some assets that might not have otherwise been built to be designed and built. That allowed us to retain our staff, by and large. We did not have to shed those people. We did not have to lose them to the industry and to the profession forever.

That was very helpful to our industry, particularly if we are going to go into another long-term infrastructure program, because we were able to keep those people and that expertise on the payroll. That was key.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

As we move forward trying to balance the budget, I think I'm hearing you say it's important for us not to look at the transfers to the provinces that fund post-secondary education and those types of things as a way to quickly and easily balance the budget. Maybe we should look at other things. I think you're saying that the gap in the demographic resulted from the fact that we didn't have the students coming out of the schools in the mid-nineties, and therefore there's this massive gap in the industry right now. Is that correct?

[John Gamble]

The drop in enrolment was directly related to the real and perceived lack of opportunity.

We talked about young people going into engineering. Frankly, I'm surprised anyone goes into engineering in our public school system. Nobody knows what engineering is in our public schools. Again I don't mean to be glib, but our school systems across the country are largely designed by B.A.s to create more B.A.s, and it's even worse for trades.

There's a stigma that if you go into a shop class or go into industrial arts in high school, you're a dumb kid, and that's terrible, because not just engineers but tradespeople are sometimes wealthier than we are. That's another area where we have an acute gap. I think we have to rethink a lot of our education right from the ground up and present engineering and science and technology, the whole STEM group, as something that's attractive to all demographics. We have to get away from Dilbert.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

You just mentioned Dilbert, which is going to be my transition here. I'm interested for a reason that you might not expect.

Ms. Carter, you brought up women, and I have a 13-year-old daughter who I have been telling since she was six that she should think about engineering because she is very math- and science-oriented.

I also have a 17-year-old son who has autism, and I'm interested in the Dilbert comment, because one of the things we talk about in the autism community is that we see a lot of families, a lot of parents of kids with autism—there's kind of a genetic component—who tend to be fairly heavily concentrated in fields like engineering, accounting, IT, and those types of things. There is speculation that one reason would be that one of the strengths of people who are high-functioning on the autism spectrum is that real focus on detail and numbers and structure and concrete things, so we would look at that as an advantage.

To what extent have your organizations explored working with organizations that research and look into using those strengths of people who might come across as socially awkward but who have real strengths to offer if organizations like your own might look for those strengths and find out how you can utilize them? To what extent have you done that?

[Marie Carter]

I don't believe we have done that, and I think that is a really interesting aspect for us to look at. Certainly the engineering community has a range of skill sets from the incredibly detail-oriented to the less detail-oriented and more big-picture, strategic-type thinkers. We need the detail-oriented people as well as the strategic and the big thinkers.

I actually shared my four years of university with a young man who was high-functioning autistic, and I was in awe of his capabilities. I do think that is a very interesting area to consider.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

I'll throw that out as a little bit of a challenge.

There's an organization in Calgary called the Sinneave Family Foundation that has a significant endowment to research this vocational piece, and they do look.... My son's in a little different circumstance. He is a 3- or 4-year-old in a 17-year-old's body, so we're not realistically looking at him getting an engineering degree, but for him they look at the opportunity to work in a warehouse or something like that—something with repetitive tasks, such putting things away, which he loves to do. They look at challenges across the skills spectrum in people with developmental disabilities, and there are people at the high end who certainly would make exceptional engineers. I would encourage you and challenge you to take a look at an organization like that and the opportunities that might be presented there.

I'm going to switch gears for a second.

Mr. Marceau, listening to your comments and your point on succession planning, I was quite surprised to hear you say that the gap between supply and demand had traditionally been filled by immigration, and then you used the words “not an option any more”. I find that pretty surprising, because I represent a riding that is extremely diverse, with significant amounts of immigration. We talk to people with engineering backgrounds, among others, who are looking to help bring people over here through the immigration system. It seems that there is a real demand to come to Canada and benefit from the strength of the Canadian economy and the opportunities that present themselves here.

Costas talked a little bit about the immigration minister's focus on skills in the immigration system and the shift towards focusing on the skills we need, which sounds exactly like what you are asking for right now.

Maybe you could elaborate a little on why you think it is not an option, because I find that surprising.

[Dr. Richard Marceau]

It may be an option today, but it won't be an option for very long. That's what I'm really trying to say.

Look at China and the way it's building infrastructure. They're building thermal power plants, major infrastructure power plants, at a rate of one every week, or something like that. They are coal-fired, oil-fired, and gas-fired plants. They need engineers to build the huge cities that they're presently building. They have built a large number of new universities.

They are churning out a huge number of engineers as we speak, but they have the capacity to absorb those engineers because they are doing nation-building. India is doing nation-building. You can't do nation-building without engineers, so the issue is....

There will be engineers who will want to leave, yes, but then we have to look at what's happening in the entire western world. The issue of the demographic of the baby boomers leaving the workforce and transitioning into retirement is creating a significant gap. It is maybe not as big a gap in some areas as it might be in others, but it is creating a significant gap.

In Europe, the U.S., and Canada, we are not well tooled to fill that gap. We've traditionally filled that gap through immigration, but if engineers elsewhere can have a high quality of life, a well-paid job—and not just a job, but a career—where they grew up and got their education, why would they leave? China is doing everything it can to keep its engineers. So is India.

That's all I'm saying. It's going to be a highly competitive market. We do have advantages. We may yet successfully attract some people, but we used to attract them by doing nothing. Today we're going to have to work hard to get something, but it will be nowhere near the kind of influx of immigrating engineers that we used to get.

That's all I'm saying. We just have to be realistic. We will have to create our own next generation of engineers. We will have to face the fact that we have to retool our universities to supply the engineers we need if we're really serious about maintaining the quality of life and the wealth-generating capacity that we have today.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

I agree with you that a balance is needed. I was just in Africa, though, and saw immense projects being undertaken by Chinese engineers. Because there's not enough work to be had in China, they're sending their engineers to other parts of the world to undertake these massive projects. It was quite an experience to see what's going on there.

I think we have to find the balance, though, and I think you guys have given us some wonderful ideas in that regard.

[Dr. Richard Marceau]

I think the Chinese engineering firms are competing on the world market to bring wealth to China. It's not because they don't have any work in China; it's because they want to create greater wealth for China.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you, Dr. Marceau.

Now we'll move on to Mr. Stewart for five minutes.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

I have just a quick question, and then we can go to Mr. Thibeault.