Finance Committee on April 2nd, 2014

[Jean Lortie]

Well, it's not enough. The Canadian pension fund or the Quebec one is not enough to ensure you have a secure revenue when you retire at 67. What we're asking for is that it be mandatory in Canada for employers to contribute to an RRSP, or to a defined benefit pension plan, at least, to make sure that they are attracting and retaining a workforce. Younger workers who are coming in are asking for a good job and saying, “I might invest in a few years here. I might move elsewhere. For all those years that I'll be working across different jobs, I just want to have a pension fund.”

[Murray Rankin, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Why isn't that just the Canada pension plan and Quebec pension plan now, with more money and higher premiums so that people will have a decent retirement? Why wouldn't we just improve the Canada pension plan, which is mandatory anyway? Why talk about RRSPs, and so on?

[Jean Lortie]

Okay, it's a tripartite one. Employees would have to contribute mandatorily. It's not a voluntary RRSP, where you put in 2%; you go to TD and invest it, or whatever. Someone does invest your money. Employers would have to contribute and, of course, government, federal or provincial, depending on the region. It's a tripartite one. You would invest part of your salary for the long-term purpose of being able to retire with safe financial assets, a safety net.

[Murray Rankin, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Got it.

[Jean Lortie]

By having a mandatory one.... Right now what we're seeing across the board is that most employees don't contribute if employers do not, or employers contribute only if the employee does. It's voluntary. At 25 years old, you want a Camaro, a red car. You don't want to have a pension fund because you don't believe you'll be aging, but 40 years later—

[Murray Rankin, NDP, Victoria, BC]

You have nothing.

[Jean Lortie]

—you are aging and you have nothing except the public pension fund.

[Murray Rankin, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Thank you for the clarification.

The next question, if I may, is for Ms. Moreau. I also wanted to give you an opportunity to say a little bit more about your three recommendations.

I'd like you to speak a little more about the one that says to introduce the EI training credit or renew the EI hiring credit with a focus on youth. You also talk about informal on-the-job training. Tell us a little bit more about what you mean there.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dave Van Kesteren]

You have less than 30 seconds.

[Monique Moreau]

Briefly, we see this as a valuable way to incent employers to continue to grow their employee base. Payroll taxes are a significant barrier to employers at the small business level, to hiring. They're essentially revenue neutral. You have to pay them whether you make any money or not that year. If we want to encourage employers to hire youth, in particular, one way to do that might be to offset the EI payments they're making during the time when they're hiring and training a new person and they themselves are not working in their own business.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dave Van Kesteren]

Thank you.

Go ahead, Mr. Allen.

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

Thank you to our witnesses. Thank you for your patience as well.

I think we should make sure the record is clear in that CPP is still available at 65. It's OAS that's available at 67, and it's still 2029 when that becomes fully implemented, just to be clear.

Ms. Moreau, I'd like to ask you a question about slide 8 where you talk about the top labour shortages by skill level. The first level is the jobs that require on-the-job training, and then the second one, which has a significant number of responses, is jobs that require a high school diploma or occupation-specific training.

With that big a response from your members, do you see those as being prime candidates for something like the job grant?

[Monique Moreau]

Absolutely. I think small businesses support the intent and the principle behind the Canada job grant as long as it's administered in a way that is cognizant of the realities of the small business level. We'll be seeing the details now as they shake out provincially, of course, but many small business owners need it to be a no paperwork or limited paperwork option and need the payments that come through from the federal government and the provincial governments to come through quickly.

In terms of recognizing the contributions that employers make to on-the-job and formal training, we think this is one option, and they were willing to experiment. That's what our members have told us, that they're interested in testing this out.

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

Thank you very much.

I'd like to go Mr. Pilarski, Mr. Reid, and Mr. DiCaro on the next question. It's a continuation of Mr. Hawn's line of questioning. I think he wanted to inquire as to the apprenticeship grant and the interest-free loans for apprentices.

In your view, is that going to be something that is helpful?

[Sean Reid]

No question, the apprenticeship loan is going to be....

I think actually, getting to the other point earlier about whether employers need more money, what we need to do is create demand on the side of the trades, of the prospective tradespeople. Removing things like cost, mobility, and perception barriers is what's going to fill the pipeline with potential workers. That's where I think our focus needs to be.

[Peter Pilarski]

I'll just add to that. Definitely the loan and grant programs will be helpful, or are helpful. But there are other barriers, I think, to what Sean is saying here. For example, trade schools aren't very flexible right now. They offer programs that go a certain period of time. They don't go in the summer. There are no evening classes available.

There are a lot of different ways we can structure trades education that would make it more accessible for students and for businesses actually as well. I think we need to take a bit of a bigger picture approach to it and see how we can structure our training systems to allow for more training to happen.

[Angelo DiCaro]

I'm not sure how much more to add on this, but just from our experiences dealing with some of our younger members, a lot of whom still work in manufacturing facilities as some folks have mentioned, it's still declining significantly. A lot of them expressed to us the frustration with folks on the older age side of the equation staying long on the job, not opening up opportunities for apprenticeships within the manufacturing facilities where they work currently. They're just kind of waiting in the queue for those opportunities to arise.

Perhaps retirement is a problem or a consideration to that. Then, once we train these apprentices, where do they go? We have lost a huge, a tremendous amount of manufacturing jobs where typically skills-trade workers are needed. I think that's another side of the equation about what's to become of this once really predominant sector for youth employment. It's kind of gone away. We have to consider where the jobs are in the long term.

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

I'd just like to ask this.

I know, Mr. Pilarski, you brought this up and you talked about the Province of Alberta and the Province of New Brunswick doing this back in the early 1990s. They took all the trades out of the schools. I think we're paying now because we lost a generation of tradespeople who probably would be working and would be employable at this point in time, and now they're out there somewhere. Some of them are working and probably some of them are not.

This might be one for the German experience as well. To try to bring that all together in Canada, you'd have to have.... We talked about mutual recognition, all those kinds of things. I wonder if that should be something the federal government should try to deal with as part of the internal trade barriers, because we have provincial jurisdiction on education. We have all those kinds of things thrown into the mud here that Germany probably doesn't have. Is that something the federal government should be looking at as part of the internal trade discussions?

[Peter Pilarski]

I have a couple of comments. The federal government used to actually support high school trades education in the way that I've described. Part of the reason that disappeared was that federal funding went away. That's why I put that recommendation forward. But there's no question that dealing with internal trade barriers absolutely needs....

Germany deals with this as a country. Our problem is that we have 10 provinces and three territories, and we each have our own set of rules, and really there are big limitations to trade internally.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dave Van Kesteren]

Thank you, Mr. Pilarski. That's it.

Mr. Dubé.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

While we're in the spirit of correcting the record, I think I'd add in my two cents that 2029 is exactly when some of the folks of my generation—whom this study is about—are going to be retiring, so I think it's important to mention that.

That said, Mr. Lortie, I would like to know a little more about employment insurance reform. Let's take the tourism sector, for example, which employs a lot of young people. The sector can sometimes provide seasonal work. That being the case, does employment insurance reform affect the employment situation of those young people?

[Jean Lortie]

It does.

I am the Canadian co-chair of the Canadian Tourism Human Resource Council.

We have noticed that employment insurance reform acts as an obstacle to young people coming into the job market, in tourism specifically, because it is a highly seasonal industry.

We have conducted studies in Quebec and in Canada. I also sit on the Canada-wide committee. We have criticized this employment insurance reform because our studies have shown that it has an impact on those wanting to get into an industry that employs a lot of young people. The reform means that those young people could not actually use an employment insurance program as such if they needed to. I find, we find, that the reform is not a good one, especially for an industry that employs as many Canadians, and as many young Canadians in their first jobs and in their first employment experience in Canada.

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

That also must feed underemployment.

Some time ago, when we were debating the reform in general, young people and not-so-young people were talking a lot about the issue of forcing people to take a job for which they are overqualified. Given that we are talking a lot about underemployment among young people, that must also be an important aspect of the discussion.

[Jean Lortie]

It is going to drive down the quality of jobs in the tourism industry. There was a lot of talk about qualified jobs, jobs for young people with trades. It is certainly going to disqualify the industry, which will become a kind of employment prison, if this is all about having the right to benefits or not. It is certainly not good news for the industry.

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

I have a question for Ms. Anson-Cartwright about chambers of commerce.

I really liked what you said about an “either/or” response.

There is a lot of talk about university education as opposed to training the workforce. Can you tell us more about that? We hear a lot about prejudices on one side and the other, but I think the two can coexist. That is what you said, is it not?