Finance Committee on Oct. 17th, 2016

[Steven MacKinnon, Liberal, Gatineau, QC]

I have more questions, but I'll throw out a couple of things and then obviously come back to that one, if you wish, Mr. Davidson or Mr. Watson.

In your brief, Mr. Davidson, you specifically addressed the issue of indigenous students and access. Clearly, as we travelled through the country, that population was identified as one that would be highly susceptible to assisting in the skills gap. You do mention direct funding and I'd like you to expand on that, if you would, Mr. Davidson.

On experiential learning and more generally on labour force information, 20 years have gone by since labour market development was devolved from Ottawa to the provinces. Do you have reflections on that? You outlined, Mr. Davidson, access to labour market information as a conundrum. Mr. Watson, I think you did as well. Can you outline for us some of the measures that might be taken, or expand on those, so we can get universities, colleges, polytechnics, whatever, better labour market information so they can customize their programs, or their experiential learning programs?

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

We'll start with Mr. Davidson. We're rapidly running out of time, and Ms. Wildeman wanted in as well, and Mr. Watson.

Go ahead.

[Paul Davidson]

On the skills gap, over the last number of years I've planned seven skills summits where there was a lot of finger-pointing about who should be doing what. What I'm really pleased about is that we do have some better labour market information and we have much more labour market information. There is strong consensus amongst colleges, polytechnics, universities, and the business sector that we need to continue to invest in labour market information to take advantage of big data to help us better project what the needs are and what the supply will be.

I want to commend to the committee work by Ross Skinny at the University of Ottawa who has done a study of every graduate from 14 institutions tied to their income tax files. What it shows is that post-secondary graduates do very well. I'll just highlight that.

I also want to come back to your point about continued investments in labour market information. Continued federal-provincial cooperation on that will be important.

On the aboriginal case, this is one we have to do better on as a country. The indigenous youth population is growing at three times the national rate, while university retainment is one third the national rate. There are a number of systemic barriers to that, but you might be shocked to know that the federal government supports fewer aboriginal students going to post-secondary today than it did 15 years ago. That's because the pot has remained closed and the number of students who have completed high school has increased. We are leaving thousands of indigenous students who have completed high school without the means to get into post-secondary of any kind.

We do try to increase direct financial assistance. There are a number of mechanisms that could be approached. There is the existing program. There's also the phenomenal work of Roberta Jamieson and Indspire, which has not only received federal funding but has also received significant private sector funding as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Ms. Wildeman, and then Mr. Watson.

[Amanda Wildeman]

I just wanted to weigh in from the agriculture perspective on the skills gap. As I said in our presentation, we talked about new farmers and the need for more new farmers. Within the next 10 years, we can expect 70% of our current farmers to be retiring. That number is already significantly down from previous years. Less than 2% of Canada's overall population is currently actually farming. There are many more involved in the agriculture sector, both up and downstream. Within 10 years we can expect 70% of our current farmers to be retiring.

In a recent survey done by the National New Farmer Coalition last year, they found that about 70% of people looking to get into agriculture did not grow up on a farm. The ideas and the policy implications that are coming out of that traditional assumption that the farm gets passed on through the family, and the person taking it over has grown up with a lifetime worth of skills by the time they're 18, are no longer true, so we need new mechanisms to get young farmers access to farms. We need new mechanisms, experiential learning, and agriculture programs in universities. We need to tie all of those elements together, so even though we're talking about different sectors, the solutions are largely quite similar.

Interestingly, in New Brunswick, our provincial economic growth plan, just developed and launched last month, highly emphasized agriculture as an economic opportunity, since Canada as a whole—and New Brunswick, in particular, obviously for our provincial plan—has such a strategic asset with our agricultural lands that many other countries don't have. Bypassing this would be such a missed opportunity. We have the land and that's a resource we can't build, we can't create again, so how do we best take advantage of that?

[Steven MacKinnon, Liberal, Gatineau, QC]

That's a good point.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Mr. Watson, we're considerably over time, but we do not have many people registered for the open-mike session following, so we'll probably go on in this session a little longer.

[Robert Watson]

Thank you very much.

Every industry sector in the world, every government in the world, every region in the world, is talking innovation, is talking the digital economy. They're all talking about the same thing. Learning the digital economy, learning about digital is the enabler for anybody in the world to do better. It is not geographically bound either. If you have the right connections, the right background, you can get knowledge anywhere in the world. This is what we should build on: connectivity, experiential learning for the youth, for people's second careers, third careers. It's all there, and it can be fundamental for every sector: remote farming, remote health, remote everything.

There is a case in New Brunswick here where a company is using first nations on reserves to do quality checking on applications. It's very innovative and it comes out of New Brunswick. There are no boundaries here. We just need to focus on it and get at it, because everybody else in the world is going at it hard.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you.

We'll turn to Mr. Aboultaif.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Thank you very much. I'm hearing a lot of good stories.

I'm going to focus my questions on the tourism industry, and also education. The first question is to Mr. Seabrook and Mr. Shaw. How big an industry do we have? Are you satisfied with tourism in general? How much income does that bring to the overall economy of New Brunswick, or Fredericton, if you wish?

[David Seabrook]

We're satisfied with the tourism this year. It was very strong. Just to give you a sense of scale, in Fredericton alone tourism is worth about $241 million a year, and it's worth somewhere from $800 million to $1 billion in New Brunswick, so it's very key. It supports a number of different sectors within the economy, whether we're talking about artists and festivals and events, whether we're talking about the hotel sector, the restaurant sector, taxis. It has a broad constituency.

The challenge with tourism is, unlike many other sectors, it doesn't have a singular voice. There's a tourism impact at the gas station, but the gas station owners don't necessarily see themselves in the tourism business the same way as other sectors do. That's why, in particular with the federal government, I mentioned continued and increasing investment in Destination Canada. For many years we weren't able as a country to invest marketing dollars into the United States. Last year's budget put marketing dollars into the United States, and that had a very positive outcome, but that needs to be expanded. It's still limited to a number of key U.S. cities. For instance, in New Brunswick we're not able to do cross-border marketing directly into Maine. That may be a small impact nationally, but if there were partnership dollars available to Fredericton and New Brunswick to go into cross-border states, smaller communities, that would have a significant economic impact.

[Larry Shaw]

To add to that, there's a bit of a perspective that I think is important to understand, particularly at a budget level. To plagiarize a statement by President Kennedy, you need to focus on the tide, and the tide will lift all ships in the harbour. The reference I'm making is that tourism is not independent from the other economic development agendas that we need to work. Tourism, in fact, is an enabler to some of the other economic development opportunities. When you bring it down to an arts and culture sort of experience, that's the same experience we utilize to grow businesses. It's the same experience that we utilize from a holistic perspective to attract people. It's the same experience that we depend upon when we're entertaining expanded companies or, in some cases, soft landing zones, from attraction abroad.

It's really important to understand that if you don't keep the ship in the harbour called tourism or arts and culture lifted in the same manner that you maybe do with visual infrastructure or something else, then you're going to let a part of the economic development fabric fall by the wayside. You really need to have policies that cross a lot of jurisdictions, if you will.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Yes, go ahead.

[Ted Wiggans]

I'd like to add that a growing area of tourism is agri-tourism. When people go to another country, they don't go to that country to taste McDonald's or Tim Hortons or whatever; they want to experience something different. They want to experience the local cuisine, the local food, and the local culture.

One thing I really notice when I drive through Quebec, for example, is how much emphasis there is on local foods and local farming, that kind of thing. People stop for that kind of thing. If I go to France, I'm going to France for that food, not American or Canadian food. I think that's a really important thing, especially in rural parts of Canada. If you want to get people into the rural countryside and provide some kind of economy there, then there has to be some reason for them to stop and not just drive through.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Mr. Davidson.

[Paul Davidson]

In tourism and higher education, it's important to note that international students now contribute over $10 billion a year to Canada's economy. We have to have best-in-class immigration policies and best-in-class visa processing times to attract these students in a very competitive market.

I was really struck at the airport while waiting for my bag—because the Fredericton airport is in need of expansion—by the French language school board's recruiting of international students at the airport. I was interested to note that the University of Moncton has, I believe, 1,300 international students. On the other coast, at the Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, international students now contribute more to the economy than the three closed lumber mills in Nanaimo did.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

I would like to stay on that point. The main reason I brought up tourism is to link the tourism and education industries together. I do believe —and I know this first-hand because I'm working on something for international programs—that Canada's education is well wanted by many places in the world, and that's a great opening.

I know in the immigration policy, at some point, we have certain considerations in the overall policy, but in the meantime I hear Mr. Davidson's tone when he talks about mobilizing Canadian talent. I believe also that in education you have to have a national strategy regarding where we miss and where we hit and where we're doing well and where we're not; and how we can put all of these provinces together to fill some of the gaps, especially the skills gaps that we heard about on the road last week in western Canada.

How much can we stretch ourselves into the educational industry, first of all, to make it into a revenue sector? It is a revenue sector, but how much can we stretch it further, and what do you expect the federal government to do in order to accommodate such things?

[Paul Davidson]

There's a huge opportunity in this area in the post-Brexit period and with what's happening in the United States. We have a moment to brand Canada as secure, affordable, and welcoming to international students. To do that will take resources. Some ministers have asked why Canada is not as well represented in Delhi as some other countries, like Australia or Great Britain, are. The reason is that the Government of the United Kingdom spends more in Delhi to attracts students than the Government of Canada spends globally. This is an intensely competitive game, and just as in tourism, we have to market Canada aggressively to bring students here.

I also want to underscore the benefits to Canadian students of having international classrooms and the links to the local economy. We would like you people to think of Canada's universities as the Pier 21 of the 21st century.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

We'll move to Mr. Watson, then Mr. Seabrook.

[Robert Watson]

The federal government can directly work with our ICT industry, in fact, with corporations directly. Canada has some world-class corporations in the ICT sector as well as large international corporations that have set up world centres of excellence here. Microsoft, Ericsson have set up places where they export this expertise internationally and bring in new employees and students for that. The more you can work with corporations directly and make it more advantageous for them to set up their world-class places, the more they will do it.

Canada is a very good place for them to set up. It's safe. The employees like coming here, so it's a good spot to carry on doing that.

You're doing a good job. I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong, but to carry on and take it to the next level would be very good.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Mr. Seabrook, you have the last point in this round.

[David Seabrook]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The point about international students is incredibly important, both as full-time students going through our universities but also summer institutes. We have an English language learning program here at the University of New Brunswick that has hundreds of students every summer who come from all over the world, including Brazil and India. They provide a first touch in Canada. Maybe they will come back and become full-time students. Their parents visit, creating more tourism. They go beyond the destination where their children are learning, which creates more air travel. It opens up air routes. That creates more export opportunities for our economy. It's all a link, as my colleague Larry said. The tourism capacity, the tourism infrastructure, cannot be separated from creating capacity. It's a vanguard that allows the rest of our economy to flourish.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Mr. Dusseault.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

I will ask questions in French.

I thank all of you for being here with us.

The chair, Mr. Easter, may have had my first question in mind because I think he was expecting us to ask Mr. Watson questions on the digital strategy.

I like everything you said about the digital strategy, and about offering more digital services to Canadians.

However, I think there was one aspect that was missing in your presentation. The strategy has to be accompanied by better Internet access everywhere in Canada. We also have to provide training to Canadians to help them acquire computer skills. The people of my generation are very comfortable with the Internet and all of the digital tools. However, there are people in Canada who are in remote areas—you don't have to go very far from my riding to find such places—and who do not have access to high speed Internet nor to mobile telephone services.

Could you share your thoughts on that aspect of the digital strategy the Government of Canada should adopt? Not only must we offer more digital services, but we especially have to ensure that people everywhere in Canada have access to the Internet and that they have the necessary skills to use computers.

[Robert Watson]

I think your question was how do you get connectivity in Canada? It is a big task. We have 36 million people, and the country is arguably the second-largest in the world, but a significant number of us live within 100 miles of the border, which is about 3,000 miles or so wide. It is a geographical challenge, no question, because of the investment for companies. If you want large, strong companies that are going to compete internationally, they have to have a return on their investments, which is natural.

Certainly there are ways of doing it. We should be on top of the 5G technology that's coming out. Because of companies like Nortel and BlackBerry, Canada still has some of the best radio engineers in the world. We should be on the 5G because it is the next generation. It take wireless to the next stage. It supports the Internet of things that we're going to have everywhere. You can't do Internet of things unless you have 5G.

To get to connectivity, your specific question, the government is already putting another $500 million into Connect Canada. I understand they want to call it something different but it's Connect Canada, the extension of fibre optics further out, which is very good. Certainly Canada is prime for satellite. We need to develop more satellite connections for the more remote areas because it's just not advantageous to go far afield. I was in Saskatchewan; we go up to the 60th parallel. We have communities and to get fibre optics up there is just not economically advantageous. A satellite can do the job.

It has to be a holistic approach though. You have to have an investment that goes not only into urban areas because companies have to get more connectivity into urban areas, however it's easier. That's where the competition usually comes, but to develop the connectivity out farther, there has to be a partnership between government and business. I know government can't do it on its own, nor can business.