Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to enter into the debate on these important measures.
I will begin by saying that we are proud of this government's economic record. I recently attended a conference in Europe with leaders of international companies and heads of government from the developed world. I was struck by how impressed these people were by Canada's economic record. Everyone I met said that, to them, Canada was a model for the rest of the world when it comes to prudent policies and economic growth. It is true. Here people criticize us, which is normal in a democracy. We are aware of our weaknesses and the areas we can improve on. However, sometimes we have to go overseas to see how others look at Canada, how our country is perceived internationally.
According to the World Bank, Canada has one of the strongest fiscal and economic frameworks in the world. The World Economic Forum has said for six straight years running that Canada has the most stable banks in the financial services sector. The OECD just today published its Canada annual country report, which was filled with praise for our country's record on a number of things, including the progress that we are making on skills development. The IMF has singled Canada out as having struck the right balance.
By the way, I was very touched by the preface in the report issued today by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, written by the director of the OECD. It was a preface of praise for our late colleague, the hon. Jim Flaherty. The head of the OECD credited Mr. Flaherty for his prudent leadership and strong fiscal management. I mention that at the outset to say that we are, indeed, regarded around the world as something of a model.
There remain challenges. While we have seen the creation of some 1.1 million net new jobs since the height of the global economic downturn, while we have seen relatively strong economic growth, while we are on the cusp of a balanced federal budget, while federal taxes are at their lowest level as a share of our gross domestic product since 1965, while we have all of these things, the truth is that there remain challenges. For me, one of the great challenges is what I call the skills gap, the skills mismatch.
It is interesting that in the report issued by the OECD today, it confirmed what this government and I have long said, which is that while there may not be general labour shortages in the Canadian economy, there are clearly sectoral and regional skills shortages. None of us should put our heads in the sand about that. Every major business organization in the country predicts that by the end of this decade, there will be a significant shortage of workers in its respective sector. Indeed, The Conference Board of Canada most famously issued a report several years ago projecting that by the end of this decade, Canada would be facing a shortage of some one million workers in various fields.
What I find interesting is that we have a very well-educated population. As the OECD report demonstrates yet again today, Canada has the highest rate of enrolment in tertiary education. That is, essentially, to say university and post-secondary academic education. Therefore, about 52% of our youth are enrolled, participating in university level academic formation. That is a very good thing.
It means that effectively we have one of the best-educated populations in the world right now.
However, I must add parenthetically that there are at the same time some worrying signs on the dashboard. Last year the OECD issued a very disturbing report that demonstrated a slide, a decline, in basic numeracy and literacy for young Canadians vis-à-vis our international competitors. Asian countries, such as Korea, are skyrocketing ahead of Canada when it comes to results, particularly in the STEM disciplines of science, math, and the like.
Our primary and secondary education systems have to keep pace. It is not good enough to have a high rate of tertiary post-secondary enrolment.
However, one of the problems that vexes all of us is the continued stubbornly high level of youth unemployment. About 13% of Canadians between the ages of 15 and 25 who seek employment are unable to find it. This is clearly too high. Youth unemployment is about twice as high as general unemployment in our economy.
We see other cohorts in our population with similarly unacceptable high levels of unemployment. Recent immigrants, those who have been in Canada for less than five years, face an unemployment rate between 13% and 14%. There are some 800,000 Canadians with disabilities, according to the ministerial advisory Panel on Labour Market Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities, who might be willing to or are interested in working but who do not have work, and we also have completely unacceptable levels of unemployment among our aboriginal people.
While our economy is generally prosperous and our labour market is doing significantly better than in most developed countries, these are areas that we all need to focus on. I invite creative ideas from all parties on how to address the challenge of youth unemployment, for example.
However, here is the paradox for me: we have very high levels of university enrolment, the highest in the developed world, yet very high youth unemployment as well. What is going on here?
Well, at the very same time, we see a boom in the commodities sector, the extractive industries in oil and gas, and in mines, in a huge swath of northern Canada from the offshore oil projects in Newfoundland and Labrador to Muskrat Falls hydroelectricity to iron ore developments and other mines in Labrador.
I am also thinking of all the mining projects in northern Quebec.
There is the Ring of Fire in northern Ontario, and projects all across the northern span of the Prairie west. My friends from Provencher and Brandon—Souris know very well the huge growth as a result of the Bakken reserve in southwest Manitoba that extends into Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan, of course, has huge uranium and potash developments, as well as oil and gas. There is bitumen in northern Alberta, which has the world's second-largest proven oil reserves.
There are energy infrastructure projects, such as Energy East and perhaps Keystone XL, with potential pipelines to our coasts. There are all of these huge projects.
There are also mines in British Columbia, a modest renaissance in the forestry industry, and huge mining potential and developments across the three northern territories.
In February, I had the opportunity to go to the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut and see many of these projects at work; I wanted to find out how we can hire aboriginal workers to help train the workforce so that they can take part in these projects in northern British Columbia and in all these regions.
With all of those projects together, we have what some people are calling a new industrial revolution, and we ought not turn up our noses at it.
There is in some perhaps elite policy circles a view that Canadians should be ashamed that much of our economic history has been characterized as “hewers of wood and drawers of water”. The truth is we are a highly advanced, extremely well-educated, diversified, and increasingly urbanized economy with value-added industries, with remarkable research development, science, technology, and high tech, with a very robust service industry. All of those are great things. We should never be ashamed.
I look at my friend from North Bay here, my friends from New Brunswick, my friends from all different corners of the country, whose livelihoods in those communities are dependent on forestry, mining, extractive industries, these things that have been the spine of the Canadian economy for 200 years. We have a new renaissance.
Here is the challenge. While increasingly technology drives those industries, we also need skilled tradespeople. We need the people who can actually build those mines, develop those energy projects, build the offshore platforms, build the hydroelectric dams, and so forth. We are talking here collectively about hundreds of thousands of future jobs in, not exclusively, but many of the skilled trades and related technical vocations.
Here is the big challenge I see. For the better part of 30 years our education system writ large has not been preparing young Canadians for those vocations, for the trades, for construction-related vocations, through apprenticeship programs. Instead, we as a society, all levels of government, the primary and secondary school systems, parents, the culture generally, have been sending all sorts of cues in creating multiple incentives for young people to go into tertiary academic university education. Typically the results of that kind of formation are very good. Typically the results are very strong. Typically incomes for young people with university degrees are significantly above the average.
But here is the truth. If we dig below the numbers, dig below the superficies, we will see that there are many young people going to university, incurring debt, graduating with hope that they will be able to work in their field only to find that there is no employment, perhaps for people with degrees in international relations or communications or people who have graduated from our education faculties with teaching degrees. A growing number of those young Canadians find themselves either underemployed or worse, unemployed. Many of them find themselves frustratingly stuck, as they would see it, in the service industry at close to minimum wage. At the same time, here is the paradox. We have a growing demand for people in skilled trades and technical vocations. What is going on here?
There is another challenge. The public sector, federal and provincial governments, spend more collectively on skills development and job training than virtually any other developed economy in the world. The private sector companies in Canada spend less as a share of our GDP on skills development than virtually any developed economy. One way of looking at that is that employers have been getting a bit of a free ride on taxpayers' spending in skills development.
These are all reasons why I have said that I see the key part of my job as Minister of Employment in addressing the paradox of an economy that has too many people without jobs and too many jobs without people.
Let us be clear. Again, we do not face general skills shortages. There are about 6.5 unemployed Canadians for every job that is being listed and unfilled. Clearly, there is a surplus of unemployed Canadians. That is what the aggregate labour market information tells us. This is why we do need substantially better, more granular labour market information. We need to know what is going on in particular regions and industries, which is why it was announced this week that our government will be launching two new robust labour market information surveys through Statistics Canada.
One is a quarterly survey on job vacancies that will get us very granular data by sector and region, and another is an annual survey on wage rates.
This will help us to much better inform policy and to communicate to young people where the best opportunities are. For example, later this year my ministry will be launching online, downloadable apps for smart phones, et cetera, that will help young people to establish what they are likely to make, in terms of salary, through different kinds of training.
They will, for example, be able to find out that someone with a political science bachelor of arts degree, on average, makes $52,000 five years following graduation, but that someone who has completed a Red Seal certificate journeyman's program as an electrician, on average, is likely to be making $63,000 five years following certification.
I am not sure high school counsellors are giving our young people the information that they can make more in the trades. In Britain—and this is remarkable—graduates of apprenticeship trade programs make, on average, the equivalent of a $750,000 Canadian more over their lifetimes than university graduates do in the United Kingdom.
What I want to do is get similar comparative data in Canada that can help to inform the choices young people make. As a Conservative, I believe in maximizing human freedom. I do not think the government should tell young people what kind of formation to take, what kind of job they should be interested in, but what we must do is stop sending cues to young people that suggest they are not fulfilling their potential unless they go into an academic university program. That is wrong.
This is why in March I led a delegation that included many of Canada's major business and employer organizations, some of our largest unions, and five of our provincial governments to Germany and the United Kingdom to study European models of skills development and vocational education.
I must say I was struck by how effective some of those systems are. In Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark, for example, the so-called Germanic model of vocational education training sees on average about two-thirds of their young people at age 16 go into paid trade apprenticeship programs. On average, these programs last for three years and result in their getting a certificate at age 19, a certificate that is considered by everyone in those societies as having the same social and economic value and merit as a university degree.
I know that to the Canadian ear, that might sound a bit disingenuous, but the truth is that everyone we met—government leaders, union leaders, business leaders, and academics—said that there is what they call “a parity of esteem” between skilled trades and professional occupations, between trade apprenticeship programs and university academic programs.
They do not, as we too often do, denigrate or diminish or devalue basic work, vocational training, trades, and apprenticeships. They regard those things as essential. They encourage them. They reward them. They invest in them. They value them. We must do the same here in Canada.
That is why one of the elements of the bill before us is the creation of what I think is the most exciting part of the budget, the Canada student apprenticeship loan. For the first time, we will now be providing interest-free loans of up to $5,000 to an estimated 2,600 apprenticeship students during their block training so that they can help to finance that training.
Right now there is a big opportunity cost when they leave their paid apprenticeship to go into their unpaid block training. This loan would give them a little more financial flexibility. Just as importantly, we are sending a symbolic message that we value apprenticeship training and trades and vocational education just as much as we value university or college academic education.
That is a very important message we are sending in this budget, and I look forward to continued discussions on how we can continue to produce results.
