When I went to high school, maybe sooner than some of the other people around here—I guess I can say that without getting things thrown at me—I went to high school in Oakville, southwestern Ontario. There was nothing in the high school in terms of shop class or construction or anything so there was no exposure to it.
We think guidance counsellors should come from industry. We think guidance counsellors potentially shouldn't be solely teachers. They should be linked to the local job market. We think there is perhaps a gap that can be filled there. There's nothing wrong with teachers of course but we think that providing information to students around career options in the local community is not necessarily a vocation for a teacher. We need to get people lined up with jobs in the local marketplace and it's not at the expense of my colleagues beside me. If we had people from the trades actively as guidance counsellors.... How many guidance counsellors are from the trades? I would say none because they are not teachers.
We have to do a better job at this kind of thing. We don't have to reinvent our apprenticeship system in Canada. We have a strong system and we can make it better. There are three or four or five really good things that we can do that we learned on this trip that can be easily done. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce and major employers have to want to do it. Companies have to want to train young people. They have to commit to it. If they don't, nothing will happen because you need a job in order to be an apprentice.
The community colleges aren't here but Algonquin College here in Ottawa received a large sum of money from the Government of Ontario in the $20-million range to build a building trades training centre. They have 150 seats and they get 5,000 applications a year and they're not training to Ontario apprenticeship standards. It is a pre-apprenticeship training program where kids come out of that after a year or two and they still are not registered in an apprenticeship program. It is a pre-apprenticeship “have fun swinging some hammers” course, no offence to those people.
Thank you.