Human Resources Committee on Oct. 5th, 2006

[Brian Storseth, Conservative, Westlock—St. Paul, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank everybody for coming forward and giving us your presentations.

I think it's absolutely critical that we continue to expand the dialogue between government and sector councils. You give a very good national glimpse of what each one of your industries is experiencing.

Madame Rivet, I would like to talk to you a bit about the biotechnology area and the considerable support in Canada we've found for the research side of your business. It's been going beyond the research and discovery stages that we've neglected in the past. Could you explain to me a little about the concepts of interdisciplinary training and the competency assessments you talked about in your brief, and how this could help grow the industry?

[Colette Rivet]

That would be my pleasure.

You're right, most of the biotechnology that you hear about is an individual in a research lab with a great discovery who takes off and forms a company, and all of a sudden he is faced with human resource things, soft skills, and has to organize it and talk to people. It's very difficult. They have to find money to get their products.

To get a product into commercialization can take 25 or 30 years, and you have to cross the valley of death, they call it, where there is nobody who wants to give you any financing and if you don't get that financing you're going to die. Your company will die.

What we're looking at is that even when you have a master's or a PhD, you have skills and competencies that you absolutely require to be successful in a sector. What we're looking at is finding ways for foreign immigrants as well as Canadians, people transitioning, new entrants of any type, to develop those competencies and to identify them for them so they can get them on the job and get the training they require. What we're trying to do is develop the competencies and the career profiles so people can understand what that means. We can transition it from different professions and make them workable. What we need is a certification process led by industry so that they will buy into it and say if someone has been certified and has those competencies, they won't feel there is a risk. They'll say that's great, you're in, and they keep going.

On top of that, we have all these emerging technologies that are coming about and we have to train them immediately again. It is always an ongoing thing. We're never going to be stopping learning. The industry realizes this, and they feel that the competency kind of approach and a practical assessment when you can't prove it any other way, which deals with immigrants as well, is a way of getting them in there and working productively for Canada.

[Brian Storseth, Conservative, Westlock—St. Paul, AB]

Do you think the traditional system is equipped to meet the industry's needs in this regard? Can it currently provide the interdisciplinary training that can be required?

[Colette Rivet]

At this very moment I would say no, it isn't ready. And what the industry also wants the council to help them with is to get to the curriculum and modify it as much as possible, but recognizing again that we will need more competencies in the future and we'll have to modify it consistently. We need a partnership with the colleges and universities, secondary schools, and even primary schools. We're working with the Toronto District School Board at the moment, trying to get them to bring that career awareness, getting people to study science and math again, and in the aboriginal population as well, and trying to get people aware of it, because it takes a long time to get through the education one needs for the biotechnology sector.

Having said that, because they're going into production and commercialization, we also have positions in manufacturing. The issue there is that we need the literacy skills there because it's a very highly regulated area as well, as you can appreciate, for human health, for any of the foods that we develop, etc.

We have a wide variety of skills we require. They are interdisciplinary and they're going to continue being interdisciplinary, and we need to have the colleges and universities working in partnership with us to modify the curriculum as needs be, looking more at competencies than the typical credentialling that we normally get.

[Brian Storseth, Conservative, Westlock—St. Paul, AB]

In ESL and some of the other interdisciplinary training help for immigrants and some of these other sectors that you will undoubtedly be looking at for helping to fill some of the labour needs you have, some of the colleges that specialize in this, I have found, have been some of the more private colleges, the career colleges. Have you dealt with them at all?

[Colette Rivet]

We're starting to work with them to see exactly what they provide, etc. We're also developing online modules for immigrants, which they could take even before they come to Canada, on things like terminology in our biotechnology environment, acronyms, what it is like to work in biotechnology, the culture, the entrepreneurial spirit, and that kind of thing. We're trying to develop all of that in online modules to initiate that, but we have to go further than that. We're not trying to replace the existing infrastructure; we're just trying to work in partnership with them and get that a little bit further ahead.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

You have a minute and a half.

[Brian Storseth, Conservative, Westlock—St. Paul, AB]

All right, I'll try to make this quick then. I want to talk a little bit to the electricity sector.

One of the things we always talk about is mobility between provinces. I would see that as being a real difficulty in your sector because of the different regulations in each province, the different set-up within each different province on how that goes. Are you finding some provinces more adaptable for that, with more worker mobility coming out of that?

[Catherine Cottingham]

The industry is very capable in terms of worker mobility because it is an industry that has depended, when it has needed somebody, typically on the jurisdiction next door. So they usually have a very good understanding of their colleagues' work and skills and capabilities. Our primary trades are mostly red seal, which means that they are of course part of a cross-Canada curriculum process.

So worker mobility is possible. The thing is, it's not always possible in the context of what the worker wants. To my point about cross-jurisdictional choices that people might make, we have significant need for workers in the north, in small towns and rural areas, and, as you know, Canada is becoming increasingly urbanized in terms of its workforce population. The folks we depended on, particularly our farm community, which used to be a very good source of people who would want to stay in small-town-whatever and work for the local power company as an off-farm experience, are not there for us any more. The farm population between the last two censuses has dropped 30%. So here we are extremely challenged to find our small-town people with the reliability support.

Thank you, sir.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

That's great.

That ends our first round of seven minutes, and we're going to move to our second round, which will be five minutes. Ms. Brown will start us off.

[Bonnie Brown, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for your presentations.

I agree with Ms. Cottingham and her partner, who has left, about the primary nature of electrical workers. Other people can't go to work if there's no electricity. So the labour shortage isn't quite as pressing there, even though within your own areas I know you feel it is.

In addition to the obvious need, say, for electrical engineers and the obvious need in every business for business administration people, what are the kinds of job titles that would show up in the workforce of a utility? What kinds of workers are you looking for? What are they called?

[Catherine Cottingham]

Oh, it's an extremely broad spectrum. Our most critical worker shortage already exists today. Our study as of 2004, copies of which I will leave with the clerk, show that power line workers, the people who absolutely support the build and the maintenance as well as crisis intervention for your electrical workers, are already short. Currently we have one company in Canada that is short 40 experienced journeymen. That's a crisis just in terms of operational service and maintenance support, but it's also a crisis because if you want to train new apprentices you have to have journeymen. You have to have experienced people. They don't have enough people to take off the line to train, so they're caught between a rock and a hard place.

In a hydro facility you would have millwrights, boilermakers, and quite a number of different industrial trades apart from the iconic electrician. In terms of the support staff, you would have people who would do evaluation and tests, occupational health and safety--very important in our business--significant training needs. And of course the engineering staff are broad--they're not just electricals; we need civils and mechanicals as well.

[Bonnie Brown, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Okay, thank you.

On the fish worker picture, when I came here 13 years ago, the picture of a town with a fish-packing plant was a town where for some months of the year there were a certain number of jobs, and it seemed from the descriptions that there were at least ten workers for each of those jobs. We know that within families, somebody would take the job for a certain number of weeks until they qualified for EI, and then the next week their brother would show up so that he could get his number of weeks that were required, because EI essentially kept them alive over the winter. It seems that even with the demographic change, the picture that was drawn for us then would suggest that there were so many people looking for work, I'm finding it hard to believe there aren't enough of them now.

So where did those people go, other than to Alberta? Did that generation of fish workers not have very many children? Did they all leave, or are they not educated enough to do the jobs in the new plants?

[Phil LeBlanc]

I'll try to address that.

In an area such as where we are in southwest Nova Scotia, the population hasn't really changed over the last hundred years. It's not that we have fewer workers than we did before, but it's regional in nature too. Some regions in our region have a shortage of workers willing to work in the fish plants. It's not seen as a prime job, to go work in a fish plant. There are other regions, in Newfoundland for instance, where there are communities of people who are willing to work and the plant, for whatever reason, has closed and there's no work in that region. So when you look at it from a national perspective, it's very different from region to region.

In our area, for instance, because of the seasonal nature in the summertime, there tend to be enough workers, but right now we do have a major crunch for workers because all the university students are gone, and at certain times of the year there is very much a shortage.

[Bonnie Brown, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

You say the permanent population of the town has remained the same.

[Phil LeBlanc]

It has, yes.

[Bonnie Brown, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Is it that people are choosing to do other kinds of jobs that seem to be more appealing to them?

If the population has remained the same and you still have these jobs, and there's a shortage, I don't get it.

[Johanna Oehling]

I think Phil was talking about his area in Nova Scotia, but I know that in other regions--let's take Newfoundland, for example--there has been a downsizing in the population, and I believe the statistics bear that out. A lot of the young people are leaving because they can't find permanent jobs in their province. Coupled with that, the older folks are moving and taking very lucrative jobs in Calgary, for example. All of this just compounds the problem we have with skill shortages.

On top of that, with the rationalization of the industry in the early 1990s and the more recent downsizing of the industry because times are tough and there's competition from other nations, it has become increasingly difficult to survive. Earlier we talked about having to address the issue of the management of the fisheries. There is a niche for Canadian processors, and I didn't have a chance to address that in my presentation due to time constraints. They are selling high premier Canadian product, groundfish, to the U.K. for a very high amount--there is none of this twice-frozen product that crosses the sea a number of times with something lost in the taste of it--so we have an opportunity to do better, but we need to find the appropriate workers. The skill level in today's world is at a higher level than it was in the early 1990s, so we need to address that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

We'll move to Madame Demers for five minutes, please.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to thank our witnesses for appearing before us this morning.

It been most edifying and extremely fascinating to hear what you have to say about the problems relating to your specific industries. It fascinates me to think that over the past 20 years, we have been able, as human beings, to adapt, to create, to invent, to understand and to assimilate new technologies across many fields, including computers, while simultaneously, we have lacked the necessary long-term vision required to see that our labour force is aging. This does fascinate me given that if today these 50, 55 or 60 year olds were already professionals 20 years ago, it should have been obvious that they were going to get older, especially since unions negotiated collective agreements to get pension plans for workers so that they would stop working at 56 years of age.

So I am surprised to see us in today's situation. It is also very upsetting because I have not heard any of you refer to a greater female presence in the labour force, and the need to get more women on board to meet needs and to fill positions such as power line riggers or, in the auto sector, mechanics, small engine mechanics, and so on. The same applies to the biotechnology sector, although I believe there are a few more women in working in that sector, and I am very glad about that.

On the one hand we want a renewed labour market and yet on the other hand we seem to be relying on old methods to find this labour force.

My question is directed to Ms. Steeves and especially to Ms. Cottingham, as you both work in areas where I think the possibility of achieving greater female representation is most real, and yet your remarks did not reflect this.

[Catherine Cottingham]

I would say that the industry has tried very hard. We have a couple of challenges there.

We rely on the educational institutions and their diversity profiles to support us. One of the things that I said to the deans of engineering in Canada when I spoke to them was that they have to do a better job so that we can do a better job. This is true for all equity communities; we are very challenged in that capacity.

In regard to the trades, in our iconic trade, the power line workers, we have had some success in some provinces with women. Our challenge is retention. It's a job that has shifts; you go up poles in rotten weather, and when people develop a family life, it's not as compatible as they would like, so women come, but they don't say. I'm not sure that there's an easy way to address that.

It would be fair to say that we are very conscious that we need to improve our equity profile. We have a community of challenges there. One is with our educational providers--we need them to support us and we need them to have strong equity initiatives--but likewise we need to think about how we organize our work. Are there things that we can do differently?

Indeed, as a new council, we are presenting our slate to the Government of Canada for financial support; power line workers and equity improvement make up one of those areas.

[Jennifer Steeves]

We've been working with the educational community, but certainly a lot more work needs to be done there, so that careers in our industry are presented to young women and young men as being viable, excellent careers for them. Less than 3%, I think it is, of our industry is female.

It is slow to change, for sure, but I think for the education community this is the importance of career information and partnerships with industry and various levels of government: to ensure that young people realize a connection between what they're learning in school and all the different career paths it could lead to.

Right now we struggle with the educational community's having a 30-year-old view of what it takes to work in some industries. I'm sure other industries find the same thing.

It is really about educating the education community and having the resources to do it. Being a national sector council, we certainly try to do that working on a national basis, but are trying to work with the school boards. We are working with the Toronto district school board on a pilot project to try to address those various issues: essential skills, and that there are various careers in the industry for young ladies.

The young ladies who do come in, I've heard, do very well. I know from the college instructors that a lot of young women will come in and start as automotive service technicians, but as they learn about the breadth of the industry they gravitate to the parts side of things or to service adviser, where they are using people skills. They are very good at those sorts of occupations. A lot of dealerships are putting women in those service adviser positions now, because it is women who are very often dropping off the family vehicle, so there is a comfort level there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

That is all the time we have. Thank you very much. Five minutes goes quite quickly.

Mr. Martin, you have five minutes.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you.

How much of this disjoint is from not paying people enough? In my community I have people coming in and saying, we can't get workers because now we have this big call centre industry that's developed and we can't get people in here.

My first thought—I don't always articulate it—is that if you pay them more, you'll probably get them back, because what you're offering is actually a better workplace environment, in those terms. I often wonder whether, in the old marketplace that we often hold up as the “hidden hand” of the force out there, sometimes getting people into your industry is a factor of how much you pay them. If it is a highly paid job, they'll do the education and training and will come and work for you.

I was in New Brunswick talking about child care and was shocked to discover that there were lots of people moving into child care, but as soon as they got an opportunity to work at a call centre, which was paying $10 or $12 an hour, they were moving to the call centre out of child care, which in my view would have been a much more satisfying career, perhaps.

But that is not the question I wanted to ask. I want to ask Susan this in terms of her sector. What is the impact of the cuts to the volunteer and non-profit sector and the total demolishing of the social economy initiative? What's that going to do to your sector?

[Susan Annis]

Our sector is certainly feeling the effects of the recent cuts in a number of different ways. We have a lot of not-for-profit organizations in the sector. They feel the impact of some of those cuts. The museums assistance programs specifically is one. I am not sure if you're asking for specifics, but that's an example of one.

This is a challenge for us. There is no question that this part of our sector really does need public support, as the not-for-profit voluntary sector, which has its own sector council, also does.

On the other side of this sector, though, we have a lot of big business. You have big publishing firms, you have Alliance Atlantis, you have the big film companies. They would be looking at life quite differently from the not-for-profit side.

The not-for-profit side is like the R and D in the cultural sector. It is absolutely key. It is like the heart; it's small, but it pumps the blood and makes it work.

Does that respond a bit?