Finance Committee on March 6th, 2014

[René Morissette]

This is true even if you look at those who are no longer in school. What you said is right, but if you focus your attention on non-full-time students, you will still find the same pattern.

[Gerald Keddy, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margaret's, NS]

Thank you.

Ms. Josephs, you made a comment about entrepreneurship and the fact that entrepreneurship should be in the K-to-12 curriculum. That's the smartest thing I've heard here today. Good for you for saying it.

It's not that everybody else's comments weren't important; let's clarify that comment.

I have a huge level of frustration when I hear the talk of youth unemployment and underemployment because I grew up in rural Nova Scotia where everybody was simply expected to work, and everyone could work and did work. Even when unemployment was 15% and 18% everywhere else in the world, somehow everybody found a job because they had to in order to survive.

In Nova Scotia, we have a new program between the community college system and the universities where they've taken your point on entrepreneurship and they have allowed people who want to enter the skilled trades to take their two years of a skilled trade to start an apprenticeship, or to work in the skilled trades, and that two years counts as two years toward an undergraduate degree if they decide to go back to university. I suspect other provinces have similar programs. That's been in place for a while now, and that has been a fantastic program for students. They come out, they have built up skills in the community college system that allow them to work for a good living wage and to continue in that trade if they care to. However, if they want to go back to university for an undergraduate degree, their first two years are already covered.

Have you been an advocate of that? Do you follow that? How extensive is that across the country?

[Marsha Josephs]

Yes, we are aware of that. In fact, CYBF has introduced an entrepreneurship in the skilled trades initiative that we launched in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. What we're doing there is helping those journeypersons who are in the skilled trades to learn entrepreneurial skills. They learn the fundamentals of opening their own business, as well as entrepreneurial skills to help them be better employees.

[Gerald Keddy, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margaret's, NS]

Thank you. I only have a minute and I apologize because I'm cutting it short out there, but I'd like you to take the first stab at it.

My next question is on overqualified workers, especially in education. I think we've made a serious mistake by not using your example of putting entrepreneurship and skills training in the K-to-12 curriculum, and convincing young men and women that when they get out of school, they have to enter the workforce and they need skills to do that. We have a number of people—we all know them—who are perennial students, who have master's degrees, and of course, they're underqualified, but they should never have taken that master's degree in an area that they couldn't find work. How do we combat that?

I know I'm practically out of time, but it's a huge issue.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Peggy Nash]

In fact, you're out of time, so a very brief answer, please.

[Marsha Josephs]

Entrepreneurial training and skills development needs to start earlier on. It needs to be integrated in the early years and right on through. Many of our entrepreneurs are telling us that it has been a disservice to them that the concept of entrepreneurship was not introduced to them until much later, after they've already been in the workforce, realized they didn't like the job they were doing, had a brilliant idea, and didn't know what to do from there.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Peggy Nash]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Keddy.

Mr. Dubé, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'm going to go quickly, then.

I want to say right off the bat, with respect to Stats Canada, I think something needs to be said about the fact that when we compare to the OECD average, that also includes huge outliers like Greece, Spain, and Italy. We should be setting the bar perhaps a bit higher for ourselves in Canada.

In that spirit, I want to quickly read a quote from the TD study that was referenced by one of our witnesses—I apologize, I don't remember which one. It says:

It has been estimated that a 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate equates to an initial wage loss of 6-7% and that it can take anywhere from 10 to more than 15 years to close that gap.

When you're in your twenties—and I know because these people are my friends and peers—that's a huge amount of time. Those are people who are not buying homes and who aren't having families, then schools aren't being built and stores aren't opening up in those communities.

In that spirit, my question would be for my friends from the CLC. You mentioned the fact that there's more to this issue than just the numbers. I'm wondering if you can maybe elaborate on that.

[Angella MacEwen, Senior Economist, Social and Economic Policy, Canadian Labour Congress]

What we're talking about are numbers that have already been collected by Statistics Canada, but they're not routinely published. They collect the number of people who are working part time but want more work. They are called involuntary part-time workers or underemployed part-time workers. There are over 900,000 Canadians who are working part time but need more work. That's a big issue. It's a big issue for young workers; it's a big issue for women.

The other issue is workers at the margin of the labour force. They're not actively looking for work, but if they found a job they would enter the labour force. If we're looking at people who are getting lost, people who want to engage but can't, then it's a much larger percentage of the population, and it becomes clear that it's an urgent issue.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Thanks for that.

The other issue I find a bit troubling is the discussion around the role of young people in community growth. That sort of picks up on the question my colleague asked. We've heard a lot about choosing the right fields. And one of the presentations even distinguishes between oil- and non-oil-producing provinces. I find that a bit worrisome. Shouldn't we focus on creating conditions where youth can not only find training but also have some choice as far as jobs go? What I mean by that is, when it comes to labour mobility, isn't there some concern about an outflow of people from the regions, people having to go elsewhere? That would have an impact on the rest of the community and not just young people.

[John Atherton]

I want to address one part of this, and that's the kids who leave home to go to school. Many kids in this country do that. The communities would like to have them back, at least for the summers, to get employment there. In that vein, with the Canada summer jobs program that we run, we help about 35,000 kids get jobs in their communities, and most of these jobs are providing what I would call vital community services.

As one part of our suite—

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you. It's just that my time is limited.

I'm looking less at summer jobs and more at the long-term impact. If you're talking about a program like the Canada job grant, for example, and you're training that labour force, the long-term impact—and not just of a student summer job—is that those folks are going to stay in those communities. They're going to buy homes, have kids, and help the economy prosper. It's more in that sense.

[John Atherton]

On the job grant itself, it's going to be extraordinarily interesting to see how the provinces and territories innovate around the design of it, with employers working with local service providers and connecting them with youth in those communities to get the jobs.

I can see your train of thought. I think that program, providing this new or enhanced connection between employers and the skills they need with young people and unemployed people, is a route to help folks find more permanent jobs in their communities. I can see it as being part of a solution, for sure.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

I've only got 30 seconds left. I would have liked to hear what all the witnesses had to say, but we've got a limited amount of time.

My last question is for the Canada Labour Congress representative.

A TD Bank Group study as well as others found that the manufacturing sector was especially hard hit with respect to youth employment. Do you have any thoughts on that?

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Peggy Nash]

Please keep your answer brief.

[Angella MacEwen]

Our answer is that we need a strategy to invest in infrastructure. We need a manufacturing strategy. We need a green infrastructure strategy. We also need a child care strategy.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Peggy Nash]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Dubé.

Mr. Allen, you have five minutes please.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all our folks for being here today.

If this line of questioning goes well, we'll start with Employment and Social Development, then I want to move to Stats Canada, and then I'd like to go to CLC to wrap up.

On my first couple of questions, Mr. McGovern, when you made the comment that about 6.2 million people will enter the labour market in the next decade, can you tell me how many are going to leave? As we saw in our report on the state of the Canadian labour market, the labour force participation rate is going to go down, and that's because of people leaving the market. Can you tell me how many are going to leave?

The second question is on the comment with respect to some evidence that qualifications are not optimally aligned with demand. I think we can intuitively agree with that.

What are we doing in our programs with the provinces to ensure matching and that we have the right matching? In last year's budget, we talked about preference for apprentices, for example, in our affordable housing projects, which should help some of this as well. What are we doing with the provinces on those types of things?

[David McGovern]

Let me answer your first question.

The easy part is I don't actually have at my fingertips the number of people leaving the labour market, but with the aging of the Canadian population we know that the growth of the labour market is slowing and that the percentage of the Canadian population of working age is projected to decline to 60.7% in 2031 from 69.5% in 2008.

We also know that three-quarters of the new labour market entrants over the next decade will be school leavers, i.e., youth. As well, two out of the three new job openings will be in high-skilled areas, usually areas requiring post-secondary education. We can follow up and get the number of the school leavers.

With respect to your second question—

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Thank you.

If you could be as quick as you can be on this one, that would be great. I have two and a half minutes left.

[David McGovern]

One of the things I'd like to talk about is labour market information.

The government has made a number of commitments in recent budgets and they're actually important in how you influence decision-making by youth. We know that the research suggests there are a number of ways in which youth make decisions. We know that information plays a critical role in how they make decisions as to what they're going to do beyond high school, whether they'll go into PSE, or whether they'll go into careers or trades.

We know that parents are an important source of information, and they have a significant influence on youth decisions.

Then we know that different youth subgroups also have very different approaches to making decisions with respect to career choices, whether they go into apprenticeships, or whether they go into PSE.

How much time do I have?

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

I have about a minute and a half, I'd say.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Peggy Nash]

You have almost two minutes.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Could you be quick? I might have to skip over to CLC.