Finance committee  Sure. There are apprenticeship authorities in all of the provinces and territories, and to some extent apprenticeship is really a demand-driven system. If an employer says they would like to hire an apprentice and register them with the apprenticeship authority, that's really w

Finance committee  Sure. Some of the thinking around this is that the government.... First of all, the private sector does hire tradespeople, but it doesn't do a great job of hiring apprentices and doing training, so it becomes the net poacher of talent from really small business, where 77% of all

Finance committee  Thank you very much. Thank you for the invitation to appear today as you undertake the pre-budget consultations. The Canadian Apprenticeship Forum was pleased to submit a brief summarizing our recommendations about how the federal government can provide leadership in an underse

Finance committee  I would say we've made it so that we say to our kids, “You can be anything,” but “anything” is too broad. There's not a sense of what that means. What do I need to be doing today that prepares me for anything? I do think that it's important to say to kids when they're young, “Sci

Finance committee  I think there was a real movement away from thinking that working with your hands had value. We really saw it in earlier education, in primary school and secondary school. There was an emphasis away from hands-on training and trying to connect the people who learn with their hand

Finance committee  I think that it has made an impact but when we actually look at the percentage of skills vacancies that are actually filled with temporary foreign workers, it's such a small percentage of the overall demand that we're seeing. I think there's just a sense from employers that I'm g

Finance committee  Exactly.

Finance committee  I think we would be waiting for that kind of detail. The Canada job grant didn't address what I would have said was related to apprenticeship training. We're talking about short-term training whereas apprenticeship training tends to be over four years, on average. So I wouldn't

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  The incentive grant is for the first two years and then the completion grant is for the last year. So we do cover $4,000, and it's only the third year that's not connected with the incentive grant. But that isn't the incentive to keep them employed; that's an incentive for the ap

Finance committee  Thank you. Thank you for your invitation to appear today on the subject of youth employment in Canada. The Canadian Apprenticeship Forum has prepared and submitted a brief summarizing our recommendations about how to better connect Canadian youth with career opportunities in the

Human Resources committee  At the wind-down of the federal sector council program there was a decision around strategic review at HRSDC and budget cuts, so it's not specifically targeted at the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum. We just happen to get our funding through that mechanism. We were a victim of circ

Human Resources committee  Sector councils are industry-led organizations that deal with human resources development issues within certain sectors of the economy. The Canadian Apprenticeship Forum is cross-sectoral in nature, but that was considered to be a convenient source of funding for the operation of

Human Resources committee  If you look at it in terms of a decision that has been made for an entire program, I would argue that it's not a good place to make cuts.

Human Resources committee  I would start with the definition of labour mobility at the federal level. Some of the conversations we've had with HRSDC and the labour mobility program showed that they have been concentrating on the mobility of qualifications, not the mobility of an apprentice in progress. It'