Human Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It's a pleasure to be here today. My name is Andrew Cardozo and I'm the Executive Director of the Alliance of Sector Councils. It's a great pleasure to be here to speak to you about employability. In my opinion, this issue is

Human Resources committee  Mr. Regan, I'll answer a couple of those and leave some time for my colleagues. I should stress that in terms of the organization I am here representing, the Alliance of Sector Councils, it is a coalition of 30 or so. I'll draw your attention to appendix 1 in our written submi

Human Resources committee  I'd just like to add something to that. Formulating a national strategy is a complex undertaking, owing to the fact that a number of stakeholders are involved in the process. I would suggest that there are a few major things. Having good labour market information is important s

Human Resources committee  The government talked about it in the election, and then in the recent budget announced a certain figure of money to go towards that. There are consultations under way, and sector councils are involved in those consultations. We are certainly very much interested in being invol

Human Resources committee  On all the boards of all the councils there's usually a non-voting person from HRSD who participates, but there are a lot more other kinds of cooperation that take place. For example, we held a recent workshop on labour market information where many different federal folks were i

Human Resources committee  Region-wise is the easier one to answer. You gave part of the answer, which of course is Alberta. Alberta and B.C. probably have the hottest economies in the country, so labour shortages are most serious there. Those two provinces attract a number of young people, and then you ge

Human Resources committee  I just wanted to add, Mr. Lake, that I think you've really highlighted the issue there. Regarding persons with disabilities, I've had the opportunity to work on issues around employment equity for some 20 years or more. A long time ago the debate was about the individuals and w

Human Resources committee  From what I understand, the national government of Australia has addressed the issue and has something like an agency of this kind. So that's one of the areas to look at. What I'd like to do is send you a report that we just put out called Who Does What in FCR?, in foreign crede

Human Resources committee  Certainly, retention, with the view to life-long learning, is one of the main issues we've been addressing. One of the things we want to enhance in the country is a culture of learning. As technology speeds ahead, it's important to make sure that your employees also move ahead. T

Human Resources committee  There are parts in place at the moment. Consider the essential skills strategy, which includes nine different skills: reading text, document use, numeracy, writing, oral communication, working with others, thinking skills, computer use, and continuous learning. With sector counc

Human Resources committee  In trucking, for example, the trucking council works with its employers to make sure they have the necessary skills. They may have people driving trucks who are not literate. They certainly have people who don't have the ability to use computers. Today, virtually every occupation

Human Resources committee  Good point; that's a very key point. By providing the training in the workplace, through satellite delivery or Internet delivery, it becomes a lot easier for the employer to allow the employee to take that training during work hours. For a lot of people, especially people with yo

Human Resources committee  It's pretty good, but it's quite general at this point. A number of different surveys are involved if you're talking about the whole package of labour market information. I hate to say it comes down to money, but in some sense, it does.

Human Resources committee  If you want to get a sense of how many geologists you need in Victoria, or in Saskatoon, Statistics Canada at the moment can only tell you how many geologists we need in Canada. If you want to get it down to, say, mining in Saskatoon, it becomes a lot harder to get that granulari

Human Resources committee  It's available in a few sectors. In tourism, for example, they have a satellite account with Statistics Canada. For the very big sectors, Statistics Canada is able to deliver, but not for the medium-sized and small.