Evidence of meeting #28 for Finance in the 41st Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was work.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President, Canadian Teachers' Federation
Yes. My understanding also is that in a number of provinces, career education has a higher profile and has become a priority. So I think the provinces are also working on that.
Liberal
Scott Brison Liberal Kings—Hants, NS
Thank you very much.
Ms. Reynolds, the Conference Board of Canada reports that the growth in reliance on temporary foreign workers in the food service industry may have contributed to declining youth employment rates between 2008 and 2012. Is that the case?
You've mentioned some public policy changes that may help, but has the growth in temporary foreign workers contributed to a decline in youth employment?
Executive Vice-President, Government Affairs, Restaurants Canada
Temporary foreign workers represent less than 2% of our 1.1 million workers. The most critical needs, those critical labour shortages, tend to be in western Canada, specifically in northern Alberta. There are pockets throughout the country, but our stress areas are in western Canada, where employers really have no other option. They would welcome youth workers in those communities, but they just don't exist, or they're not available for work in those communities. Yet we have a situation in Toronto where a teenager looking for a job is going to have a hard time finding one in our industry.
So it really varies depending on what geographic region you're talking about across the country.
Liberal
Scott Brison Liberal Kings—Hants, NS
It's a challenge for industry to attract and retain workers in restaurants. Typically, do entry-level employees have pension plans? Are they provided by your employers or not?
Executive Vice-President, Government Affairs, Restaurants Canada
Again, because we have such a diverse industry, it depends on the position. For most entry-level positions, no, we do not. Part-time employees, students who are saving for and contributing to their education, they're not interested in paying into a pension plan. Some of them—
Executive Vice-President, Government Affairs, Restaurants Canada
—who are hired have the intention of really only working while they're in school in the industry.
Liberal
Scott Brison Liberal Kings—Hants, NS
One could argue that an expansion of the CPP may help level the playing field and make it easier for your industry to attract and retain employees if they actually had access to a liveable CPP retirement.
Did you say 30, sir?
Liberal
Scott Brison Liberal Kings—Hants, NS
I want to commend Royal Bank, but we have to get more companies doing this.
Is there another round?
Conservative
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
We'll have to leave that as a commendation, and we'll come back.
Liberal
Conservative
Conservative
Gerald Keddy Conservative South Shore—St. Margaret's, NS
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome to our witnesses.
I think for all of us on committee this is has been quite a fascinating study. We're hearing a lot of good ideas. It'll be interesting to try to put this report together.
My question is going to Ms. Woloschuk.
I think we're all in agreement that we have a pretty good and fairly robust education system in the country, but it's not directing students well enough to eventual careers. I don't have a silver bullet for that, but it's a legitimate question. The example that's been used a couple of times, and the community college system, who presented here, has said that 22% of their graduates and 22% of their students are former university graduates. Those young men and women have been directed through their high school education process to university, to a degree that would not give them a job. They had to turn around, take those four years with them—and one can argue that education is not a heavy burden to carry, but it's an expensive one—and then go into the community college system.
They would have been much better off, quite frankly, to go into the community college system at the beginning of their career, and then be able to use those two years that they graduate with towards an undergraduate degree, if they decide to go back and get one. The system's just backwards.
How do we go about fixing that?
President, Canadian Teachers' Federation
I would say the purpose of the elementary and secondary public education system is to provide students with a set of skills that they can use in any area of study that they choose to pursue or any workplace. In terms of some of those I mentioned, problem solving and critical thinking, and all of those sorts of things, some of the information that we've received in recent years has been that students need to have that basic skill set because they may end up changing completely the type of work that they're doing over the course of their lifetime several times.
Conservative
Gerald Keddy Conservative South Shore—St. Margaret's, NS
If I can interrupt you for a second, I think we're all in agreement that it won't be a single career path, that most people will change jobs four or five or six times, or even more, outside of a very few careers. The difficulty becomes, and the complaint, frankly, that we've been hearing about the education system, is that guidance counsellors are there for guidance but we don't really have a system set up for career counselling.
How do we make the career counselling separate from guidance counselling and more robust?
President, Canadian Teachers' Federation
Actually, in a number of schools that I know of in my own province they have a career education specialist. I'm not sure of the extent of that in other provinces, but that is something we've used.
I think the point is that students do need help with good information about the labour market. It would be very useful for them also, looking at the third recommendation, that there be these job-related programs to connect them to industries that they might be interested in. Students don't get steered into one career or another by their career counsellors. What we really try to do is to help them to discover what would best suit them, and then take it from there. But the information about where the needs are in the economy for different types of careers would be very useful to students.
Conservative
Gerald Keddy Conservative South Shore—St. Margaret's, NS
I guess the type of example I'm thinking about is that in Atlantic Canada in the 1980s we drilled a number of oil and gas wells in offshore Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. We knew we would have a demand coming for low-pressure gas technicians. When they were needed, they still weren't educated. They came in from other provinces. There wasn't a program set up in the community college system. There was no direction from the school system. Those workers simply weren't available.
Somehow we need to have industry, our education system, and government, of course, all sit down together and do a better job with outcomes. I'm not trying to blame any one area. I think we're all guilty together here, quite frankly, but so far we've been unsuccessful at that.
Do I have time for a question on the German—
President, Canadian Teachers' Federation
If I could go back to that national job creation strategy—