Thanks very much.
My apologies in advance, members of the committee and fellow witnesses, I'm dragging a bit from Politics and the Pen last night. I'm a bit nasal due to the red wine consumption.
Thank you for the invitation. The Canadian building trades represent skilled trades workers across Canada in every trade you could imagine, with close to 550,000 members from coast to coast. We received the invitation to talk about youth employment, and it is an issue dear to our hearts.
Youth employment in Canada is a complex issue. I'll try to give you a bit of a tip-of-the-spear view from our organization and some of our collective experiences in construction. I'll share with you some of the things we learned recently as participants on a study tour to Germany and the United Kingdom. I do notice, from your witness list of previous meetings, that some of those delegation members have spoken already, so I'll spare you most of the gory details of the trip.
If I were playing a word association game, the first thing that would come to mind when faced with the phrase youth employment is training. Training, employment, and ultimately success are all inextricably linked. Show me a group of young people with little or no access to the right kind of training, and their employment prospects aren't hard to decipher. Show me a group of young people with access to information about training options and actual training for actual jobs in the economy, and the story is quite different.
Employment and prospects for employment all rest on the education and training available for consumption. The way in which these training opportunities are intertwined with industry is the linchpin. In law, you need an LL.B. to be a lawyer. In the skilled trades, you need a J-O-B.
Here are some quick public policy measures we think would drastically improve youth employment prospects in Canada.
We need to incent companies to hire apprentices. In construction, in our universe, fewer than 20% of companies hire apprentices. The business case is clear for apprentices. Companies can make more money on apprentices than they can on journeypeople. The margins are higher on those employees, and then they can charge their clients more money to have apprentices on site.
In terms of opponents who say that investing in young people is pointless because of poaching or because their company is too small to be able to train, it's all bogus. If the work is good and the people are properly trained, no one is going to leave over a $2-an-hour increase to go to another employer. People stay at jobs because of a company's investment in their development. Research shows that employee engagement and retention increases with investment in the people side of your business, a self-fulfilling problem around poaching.
Following are some of the key learnings from Germany, as part of the delegation.
One of the things that I found most interesting was that small companies join together in a consortia led by the chamber of commerce. These consortia and the chamber of commerce have a role to train young people and a responsibility to train young people and to plan. We think this kind of concerted effort in Canada is needed, by either the Chamber of Commerce in Canada or some other group that could add value to the system by taking the lead, much like is done in Germany—something that's easily implementable into our system in Canada.
The second thing we noticed in Germany is that there are government-funded trainers who ensure that the knowledge from journeypersons—they call them meisters in Germany—to apprentices is transferred properly. In construction, journeypeople aren't necessarily teachers. They're the people who have worked their way up through the ranks. They have the skills and they have the licences, but they're not necessarily good at transferring skills to other people.
I hope you guys didn't hear this yesterday.
Did you know that in Germany 50% of young people go the skilled trades route, and 50% go the academic route? There are off-ramps between the systems for kids as they move through the system—