Finance Committee on Oct. 21st, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you.

Merci, monsieur Laforest.

We'll go to Mr. Menzies, please.

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much to all of our witnesses today. I don't think that it will come as any surprise to you that we would remind you that our stimulus measures were targeted, and “temporary” is the operative word. I'm quite glad that some of your suggestions here today are strategies rather than just asking for money, because we have a real challenge here of what we can realistically recommend to the finance minister to put in next year's budget. So the strategy suggestions are very helpful here.

First of all, to Mr. Charlebois, you referred to a national education and training strategy in your presentation, and you also referred to mobility. My sense is that we still have a struggle with mobility. I know we've gone through it in our own family, moving from one province to the other with our kids. Is the mobility issue an integral part of that strategy?

[Tyler Charlebois]

Yes, in terms of a national strategy, what we're looking for in terms of the mobility issue is for people who are training and getting education in other provinces to be able to move to another province and have that education recognized. We have a major challenge in certain pockets of the provinces in the country where that's not happening. Ontario, for example, doesn't actually have a system of credit transfer to go from college to university, or from university to university, to permit that prior learning to be recognized. We're losing many Ontarians and Canadians to other countries, such as the U.S. I have colleagues who graduated last year who are in Australia studying--

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

Australia's quite aggressive, isn't it?

[Tyler Charlebois]

If you move to Australia, I don't know if you're going to come back. Their climate is simply really good--

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Tyler Charlebois]

--compared to many climates in Canada.

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

He's got a point.

[Tyler Charlebois]

The mobility aspect is really key to a national strategy to make sure we are looking at education and training as a system, and looking at it as a country rather than as pockets of provinces and territories.

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

There's competition, and there always will be competition among education facilities, whether they are primary or secondary. Is that a positive or a negative? We want our institutions to compete and be the best they can be, but are we...?

[Tyler Charlebois]

Should we be competing against each other, or should we be competing against other jurisdictions? That's the problem: we're losing our competitive advantage by competing just with ourselves for our small pool of population.

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

Are we competing enough internationally to bring international students here?

[Tyler Charlebois]

I think we're falling behind in those terms, and as you've seen from the skill shortage, we need to bring more. We need to do more to attract international students and international immigrants here to Canada. I think that having a strategy that encompasses mobility of learning would go a long way to help.

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

Good, but then that runs counter to what Ms. Fralick and Mr. Charette are saying in terms of our not having enough spaces for the students we have now. Your comments are very troubling, and I think we can all see this in our ridings, where health care students just aren't being trained.

Is it that we're lacking bodies to fill the spaces, or lacking spaces for the bodies?

[Pamela Fralick]

Yes.

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

Yes to both?

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Pamela Fralick]

There are two aspects to the question. One is that generally, in almost every health profession, we have lineups of people trying to get in, but we don't have the spots in the institutions, we don't have the educators to teach, and we don't have the clinical placements to provide the on-the-ground training they need.

On top of that, when you look at the international realm, there's the whole issue of ethical recruitment. Canada has been known to.... I'm sure you've heard the statistics: the largest number of South African trained physicians outside of South Africa is in Saskatchewan. We have to be very careful--

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

We have quite a few in Alberta.

[Pamela Fralick]

Well, you don't win the cake, but that's exactly my point. It's why I made the comment that in terms of health, we can't rely on the external world. First of all, the United States has been the greatest consumer of Canadian-trained health professionals. If we think it's going to get any better with President Obama's move to bring health care to 47 million new individuals, it's just going to exacerbate. There aren't enough health professionals to go around, and that's why I included the information from the World Health Organization. I think we have to do more to be self-sustaining at a domestic level, and not just for health, but for all the industries we're talking about.

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

As an Albertan, I'm very troubled by some of the policies we're taking in Alberta to limit entrance into health care.

[Pamela Fralick]

We can talk offline about that, if you'd like.

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

Maybe we'd better not. I shouldn't even be on the record as saying that, but I'm concerned for our constituents, because we have future concerns, and to--

[Pamela Fralick]

Can I make one comment?

I do believe that our colleges and other institutions are part of the solution to the issue you raise, in that if we coordinate our work around practising in scope and getting the right health provider in the right place, we don't need the highly educated health professionals to be doing all the functions. We need to have the right number at the right level, and it's at the community college level that we get a lot of our rehab assistants for occupational therapy, physical therapy, med lab, rad tech, etc. If we can focus on coordinating that activity.... We've done a fair bit on the university-educated health professionals, but not nearly as much in a coordinated way on the ground with our community colleges. If we get the right people trained to standards, get the right competency base, and have them do the things we need them to do, it takes the pressure off physicians and nurses and allows them to do other things.

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

I want just a quick comment from Mr. Charette.

Has the $2,000 apprenticeship grant program been helpful, or has that pushed more people into apprenticeship? Are we overloading the system?