Finance Committee on April 8th, 2014

[Dr. Wayne Lewchuk]

We did a study of the Magna corporation. We went in and interviewed workers and management there to try to figure out what made Magna tick. This was 10 years ago.

It's certainly a system where they encourage their workers to participate more. What was quite fascinating to us was that Magna, largely a non-union workplace, had decided to move to a system of elected representatives on the shop floor because management felt they didn't have a pipeline to figure out what was going on there.

So in some ways they replicated a union model without having a union.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

Was it successful?

[Dr. Wayne Lewchuk]

Magna's a very successful company; absolutely, yes.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

When you talked to the employees, were they happy with the arrangement?

[Dr. Wayne Lewchuk]

I think they see Magna as a good place to work, yes, absolutely.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

This leads me to the next question I want to ask you. We've had a number of conversations in the last few panels about our educational system. As you know, Mr. Kenney has gone to Germany...and of course, in the case of Frank Stronach, he was Austrian, but probably he's familiar with that as well.

Are we maybe missing the boat in our educational system? Are we not preparing youth for what they really should be...? I mean, obviously it's not the only thing in life, but it's a pretty big part of life. Is it time to take a good hard look at our educational system and maybe start to transform it?

[Dr. Wayne Lewchuk]

I think the educational system can always be made better. It can always be made fair. I think it's quite clear that not everyone has the same leg-up in the educational system right now. It can always be made fair.

I don't think, though, to be frank, that there is a shortage of skilled young Canadians out there who want to work. I don't think that's our problem.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

But is it possibly the problem that the kids who are going to school really have no direction, really don't know what they're going to do? I have to confess that this was my situation when I attended school. I really had no idea. I didn't have much guidance in that way, either.

Is that something...? I hate to use the word “streamlining”, but should we be thinking about those things?

[Dr. Wayne Lewchuk]

Maybe the issue here is what has changed from when we were young—some decades ago—in that the world was a little more stable and was a little more predictable. Now the world is changing so rapidly that I think it's beyond expectation that someone who is in their teens can figure out what they're going to be doing ten years from now when whatever they're doing ten years from now hasn't even been invented.

I think that's part of the challenge we now face in a more rapidly changing world, when making those kinds of predictions, getting that information, is more difficult. I'm not sure exactly how we solve that. I'm not sure the educational system can solve that. I think it's a collective problem that we're going to have to face, that the world just changes rapidly.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

The time has come, possibly, when we need to start talking about these things.

I want to switch over to Dawn and Noel here. In terms of first nations, we've spoken a lot about the possibilities and the opportunities in the extraction industry, and you're right; I've had the extraction people tell me they're going to need, in one particular area, 50,000 employees.

But are we missing something else? I see us running into the same danger when we tell our first nations youth that we're going to need mining workers. Are we missing the other arm, which is the unguided hand when economies start to expand and there are huge opportunities? Are we maybe just missing the vision for our young people?

What are you doing to maybe build that up and get that fire going?

[Beedahbin (Dawn) Desmoulin]

We've partnered up with Confederation College and Outland. We've done first nations natural resource youth employment programs, or FNNRYEP. We've done Mining Matters in our first nation elementary schools to give younger youths an awareness of mining processes. We've also been doing Mining Readiness, which is similar to the Mining Essentials program. That's been taking place in all of our communities.

This is just a start. This is just to get the ball going, to create that awareness.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

But are you telling them about the fact that they're going to need people to supply them with food, and the opportunities for entrepreneurship?

[Beedahbin (Dawn) Desmoulin]

Yes, absolutely.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

Good. Tell us about that.

[Beedahbin (Dawn) Desmoulin]

Because we've partnered up with Noront, they've actually worked with us in developing all of the employment pieces that are going to be offered or are going to be in demand in the business when it starts booming. We've dissected that, taken a look at all those jobs, at all the prerequisites and educational requirements and all of that stuff, catalogued it, and basically have discussed it with the youth in our communities.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

Good.

Noel?

[Noel Joe]

I think we're trying to get our youth ready to get into the trades and that kind of stuff. To get that far behind them, I think you need to start leaning more towards success of other communities and building on other success programs in the country. I think that's a key point there.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

A very brief question.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

Maybe I'll just go to you, Mr. Smith.

I think you mentioned the societal problems. We're not talking about that. How much can this be attributed to maybe the breakdowns in the homes, alcoholism, and drugs? How much of the problem is a result of that?

[Jeremy Smith]

Very quickly, we see that in a great deal of our families. It's left over from residential schools, but we also see a lack of parenting skills. Everything contributes to the factors that these youth are not going to be graduating from high school because they do have so many extra factors that affect their lives, and they just can't overcome those barriers to gain their education.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Van Kesteren.

We'll go to Mr. Adler, please.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for being here today.

First of all, I want to begin by saying that throughout the discussions that we've been having over the last number of weeks on this issue of youth unemployment, the sort of common denominator seems to be education, if you want to sum it up in one word.

I'm going to give you all a pop quiz here. Just jump right in when you have the answer to this. I'm going to throw some names out to you: Shawn Fanning, the creator of Napster; Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft; David Karp, the founder of Tumblr; Bill Gates, Microsoft; Steve Jobs; Michael Dell; Richard Branson; Evan Williams, who created the first blog....

[A voice]

What's the question?

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

What's the common denominator between all those?