Industry Committee on Feb. 7th, 2013

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to everyone for being here, and also to my Conservative colleagues across the way for agreeing with us to do this study. I think we should work together more often on things like this so that we can get experts before us.

Mr. Gamble, I'll start with you because you were talking about long-term infrastructure funding. This is something that's near and dear to me personally, and that we in our party have been talking about for a while. You mentioned the Building Canada fund, and yes, it was I think quite the appropriate comment: seven years in politics is like a hundred years. Of course, a week is a lifetime as well.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

You were talking about the need for long-term stable funding. Of course we see the need for it so that the infrastructure projects get built, but from the perspective of engineers and engineering, how will it actually help your field?

[John Gamble]

Well, first of all, to go to a little bit of what we were talking about earlier, it's very difficult to invest in brand new employees, get them productive, and get them up to speed. It's not just about the salaries. Everyone who works on a project is in a high-liability field. For the salaries our sector receives, there's a disproportionate amount of personal and corporate liability, so there are all those elements.

The ability to know that there will continue to be investment in infrastructure and, with that, all the things that spin off from that.... What I mean by infrastructure is not just the water systems and the roads and so forth; it enables the economy and has the tangential benefit to other sectors that also hire engineers. Knowing it will be there allows employers to make a long-term commitment to a new employee. They know they're going to be there. They're going to get that return on investment. It's worth investing in their training.

It's not just the school. We can't rely just on what the school teaches them. As an industry, we need to continue to help them with continuing education and continuing professional development. We need to get them a breadth of experience. We need to get them to a point where we can charge them out at a rate high enough that they can actually start paying for themselves. Clients want the most experienced guys—not at the best fees, but they want the most experienced guys. We need the ability to get them there.

That's one key element. It makes the business case for us to invest in new employees.

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Actually, that's one of the reasons that the oil sands industry is very attractive to engineers: because these projects are on the scale of 50 years, in most cases, and therefore it's easy to predict. It would be nice to have that kind of predictability in other areas, and we'll certainly be working towards that. I'm sure I'll be talking to you about that again down the road.

Ms. Walden, you were talking about the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters and the fact that they're having troubles, perhaps, in a more competitive marketplace, in competing using existing technologies. Of course, engineers are critical to helping develop new technologies. NSERC is certainly one component that can help, through the variety of programs. Another one is the SR and ED tax credits.

The CME mentioned to the committee recently that they're expecting that their research and development will drop by about 30%. Do you think it would have an impact on engineers and engineering if research and development in that sector were to drop by 30%?

[Janet Walden]

I don't think it's going to drive whether or not research is carried on in manufacturing. My comments were around how design is now a really important part of how manufacturing is done and how we need to ensure that we have that skill well imbedded in our engineers so that they are competitive moving forward.

In terms of the SR and ED tax credit affecting manufacturing, I think, as I say, that the value of the dollar, the competitiveness of our industry, and our ability to export, etc., probably far outweigh that. What we do see is that working with the research community in the universities does assist a particular small business to advance its products. In our case, most of the research that's done is SR and ED tax creditable, so for a small business—for a large business as well, but for a small business in particular—it's really helpful to have what we do in NSERC complemented by the fact that the investment the company is making is SR and ED tax creditable as well.

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

That's great. Thank you.

How much time do I have?

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Fourteen, thirteen....

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Lots of pressure.

In one word only, what's the one thing that would be most important to addressing that skills shortage or mismatch?

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Anytime you want, by the way, if you have a question from a member—and I have to stay pretty disciplined with the clock, because everybody expects me to be fair—you can certainly try to squeeze it in. I think most members are fine with that as long as they get their initial question answered.

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Perhaps, Mr. Chair, it would be a good time to mention that witnesses can always provide information to the committee afterwards if there's a question they didn't have time to answer.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Very good, Mr. Harris.

Mr. Harris is absolutely correct. If you want to submit anything to the clerk afterwards, please do that, and we'll take it into consideration for whatever is decided by the committee with regard to the information that's presented today.

We'll go to Mr. Menegakis for five minutes.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for appearing before us today. It certainly is a very interesting and fascinating subject to discuss.

I'd like to start with you, Madam Carter.

In your opening remarks you commented on the percentage of women in the engineering workforce. Was it 13% or 30%? It seems to me, to start, that 13% is a very low number. Is there a reason for that?

[Marie Carter]

Up until 1989, the enrollment in undergraduate engineering degree programs by women was about 10%. It started to increase after that. Largely as a result of the unfortunate incident at École Polytechnique in Montreal, there was a big push in trying to attract women into engineering. Nationally, we got all the way up to 23% in 2001 or 2002. We've held steady or fallen a little bit, generally. I think this year we're at about 18% or 19% of enrolment.

We do see that women are far more interested in biological engineering, biomedical engineering, environmental engineering, and chemical engineering, fields where they can see the direct relationship with a gain to society.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you. Actually, you answered my second question with that as well.

I'd like to go over to you now, Ms. Walden, and ask you something. In May 2012, the Minister of Science and Technology, Mr. Goodyear, in an announcement at the University of Toronto, which I was at, announced an additional $325 million over five years through NSERC's discovery grants program.

Can you elaborate on that a little bit, and how that will help, if it does help, which I'm sure it will?

[Janet Walden]

Our discovery grants program is our foundational program. It's a highly competitive program and supports about 10,000 university professors across the country. About 25% of those are in engineering-related fields. The funding, as I say, is competitive. Engineering is definitely a big part of that. Increases to that budget certainly benefit the engineering field as well.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

As a sort of complementary announcement, in that announcement he also announced $15 million for the discovery accelerator supplements program, which, if I'm not mistaken, was to fund a certain number of researchers over the next three years. Is that correct?

[Janet Walden]

Yes. These are really researchers who have demonstrated tremendous potential. Again, they can be in any field of science or engineering. Additional financing is provided to these people to accelerate, just as the word says, their research programs.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

I was quite taken aback with the enthusiasm when I was there. Of course, a lot of the researchers were there, and they were more than pleased that the government was investing additional money.

[Janet Walden]

This is a pretty exceptional program because it gives researchers the opportunity to pursue research where it takes them, as opposed to being more in a project mode.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

One of the areas that the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, Minister Kenney, has been focusing on is the federal skilled worker program to attract engineers, among others, who are skilled workers to come into Canada from other countries. Are you familiar with that process?

As a follow-up question, can you tell us how difficult it is for someone to get Canadian accreditation after coming from another country? Some, I assume, are easier than others.

[Marie Carter]

We are very familiar. We've been working very closely with Citizenship and Immigration. We've put a tremendous amount of work into making the engineering licensing process a little bit quicker.

The commitment that has been made and kept by our regulators is that once they receive all of the documentation for an application, that individual will have an answer within six months. Most of them give them an answer within about 30 to 45 days now as to whether they need to do anything further in order to be licensed, so they know what they need to do.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

One of the problems you noted, which most of us as parliamentarians have come across, is with young graduates trying to get out of that catch-22 situation. They have their degree, but they don't have the experience. Until they get the experience, they can't get the job, but they can't get the job to get the experience. They're stuck in that quandary, if you will.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Mr. Menegakis, I'm sorry. I was hoping we could finish, but—