Human Resources Committee on Oct. 24th, 2006

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

There were three of them.They were replaced in three provinces as of the beginning of this year. I believe it was Ontario, Manitoba, and maybe it was Saskatchewan. Was it Saskatchewan? It was Saskatchewan. Those are the three provinces. They were replaced by the Government of Canada with transfer funding to those provinces that they could use for people who weren't on employment insurance, to assist them with the upgrading and so forth.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

But the new government did not....

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

They have not been renewed, no.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

That's my understanding.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Okay. That was just a clarification.

My second point. I know in terms of the way it was addressed today, when it comes to older workers...I'm making the assumption from all I've heard today that even though we have a large group of older workers who are prepared, we talked about ones that obviously need transition skills. There really is a mindset out there in the workplace. That's really what we're battling, the bias of the mentality right now that we're not able to use these workers because the workplace is not ready for them.

We haven't come to a place where we think of what a great resource we have in older workers, that we could use the brain trust, if I can use that term, of years of experience. You're suggesting education for small businesses. Do we need to come to a place, do you think, where we get to 3%--which is less than no unemployment--before people start to figure out there are other ways? Is the situation not bad enough yet that people are saying we need to...?

[Elly Danica]

Mr. Chairman, it's bad enough for the older workers, but although there is a barrier in terms of some employers not welcoming older workers, there's also an internal barrier among older workers in that they feel dismissed by the economy as being too old and useless. They internalize that, so some of them do not present their skills adequately. There are several levels to this.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Confidence is certainly one that plays into it.

[Elly Danica]

Confidence is a really big issue. A lot of the clients we worked with, before they could go out and actually apply for a job, had to have their confidence built up so that they could acknowledge their personal value to an employer. Then they can be successful.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Did you want to add a quick one?

[Stephen Kymlicka]

I have a couple of quick comments on this topic.

I completely agree with everybody here on the notion of awareness of the brain trust that's available. I think that is a huge gap, and part of it bears on what was said earlier about this limited number of years available of work. I think this mandatory retirement age thing is one thing that's just got to go.

To give you an example of just how ridiculous it is, in order to work at the hospital here, you have to be cross-listed as faculty with Dalhousie University, which has a mandatory retirement age. We have to kick our doctors out of the hospital at age 65 because Dalhousie does. It's ridiculous.

The other thing is we have to look at trying to build a better bus. For example, one of the things that has come out recently is that bringing broadband throughout an area substantially improves the economic viability of that area. If we want non-physical jobs for our older workers, then bringing that infrastructure--if we twin the highways at Rivière-du-Loup, we'll get more traffic there and more economic activity there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

So it's a combination of things.

[Stephen Kymlicka]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

I appreciate that, thanks.

Mr. Warkentin, seven minutes, sir.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you to each one of you who have come and presented this afternoon. We appreciate your insight and your perspective.

Certainly for a moment there I thought I was back in Alberta with all this talk of not enough labour force. But then after you started talking about older people not being brought into the workforce, I recognized that maybe I wasn't in Alberta, and that in fact we're just seeing what Alberta looked like several years ago.

It's been our experience in Alberta, in the region that I'm from specifically, that older people are being brought to the table, are being brought into the workforce, because of necessity. In our situation we have negative unemployment. There are jobs that are vacant, thousands and thousands of jobs that are vacant, and everybody's employed, including the older people.

What has happened, because of necessity, is that employers have gone out and asked for these people who maybe were resistant to come in. They've gone out and searched. Quite frankly, we're still accepting résumés, so if anybody has any older person who would like a job, the person is more than welcome to come to Grande Prairie to apply. We welcome them. I do that a little bit in jest because I do recognize that people want to remain in the communities they've invested so much in. Certainly we know that.

The one thing I would recommend is any strategy we can do to encourage employers to start bringing older people into the workforce. These are the types of people who maybe are less likely to transition to new communities. If we fill the positions in these communities where there still is some unemployment with older workers, then there's a possibility that some of the younger people are a little more likely to be able to travel and move into other communities. That may be a strategy. Are there any perspectives on that?

We do have to address the issue of older workers, but we also have to address the issue that in certain pockets, specifically many communities here but also out west, we have huge numbers of jobs that are continuing to be unfilled. I'm not sure how we can strategize to figure out how we can do that, because I don't think, as it was suggested, that paying people to stay home is the answer. There has to be some other way we can do this.

[Elly Danica]

Out-migration is a real issue in Nova Scotia, because if all our young leave, there's going to be no one to support the aging population as we become very aged. There's a concern in Nova Scotia about out-migration. It's understandable, because there are these amazing jobs in Alberta, but as a province I think it's very alarming that so many of our young people leave.

While we want to be able to integrate or re-integrate older workers into our communities, we cannot do that simply because we've lost all our young. We have to have a completely integrated workforce. We need the young and the middle group and the aged population all working together, sharing their resources, sharing their energy, sharing their knowledge. So I'm a little bit leery about all those jobs in Alberta.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

And I appreciate that. I can totally relate. I think in any region where that is becoming a reality, you would hesitate to encourage anybody to leave.

The numbers seem to indicate that as far as the OECD countries are concerned, Canadian employers, comparatively, invest very little in on-site training. As a comparison, in Canada, employers spend $824 per employee, whereas just south of here in the States they spend over $1,000 per employee. I'm just wondering if there's any way you can think of--I've been asking for suggestions all morning--that we can encourage employers to invest in their employees. I think it might do something as far as possibly bringing older people into the workforce. I'm wondering if this might be a positive. How do we encourage employers to invest in their employees?

[Elly Danica]

I think employers need to be more aware that they do get a return for their investment in employees. What I keep hearing is that if I invest in a young person, that young person will give me more return on my investment.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

Okay, but our experience back home, and it may be here, is that younger people are more likely to switch employers, whereas older people are more likely to remain with the employer they trained with.

[Elly Danica]

The employer is not getting that.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

Is there a way we can communicate this? I've been asking if there are tax incentives. Do you think that would be a positive, so that at the end of the day, if they have a tax incentive to educate their employees, the employer is not out a significant amount of money?

[Elly Danica]

I think it's important to make them aware that young people are in a different life stage. They're in an exploratory stage. They will stay with an employer for a year or two and then they will move on, because they're building their careers. Older workers, because of how they were trained as younger persons, will have a significant sense of loyalty to an employer. If they're given a chance, they will do the job and they will stay.

Again, we will refer to a recommendation we made. We need an awareness campaign with employers to actually attack those myths that you get more out of investing in a younger person. You get something, yes--and I don't like to pit younger workers against older workers, because we need an integrated workforce--but we still do have value in older workers.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Ms. Bourgeois.

[Andreea Bourgeois]

If you'll allow me to answer, I disagree slightly with the OECD studies, just because I know from experience that it's much easier to measure formal training. The Maritimes especially tend to do a lot of informal training. If you take the Island as an example, there is a lot of agriculture there. They're not going to send someone to a classroom to learn how to milk a cow; they're actually going to sit down and tell you. I grew up in a city, so I have no idea about what to do with a cow. They will explain it, and they take the time.

OECD studies are good for comparison, but it's hard for a small business person. We are five people here. You could go for training today and we would have to answer the phone. So it's really a different perspective.

I'm going to sound like a broken record, but you asked if there are ways to encourage employers to train older workers. Sure, cut payroll taxes if they spend that money for training. There was a program--the new hires program--a while ago that worked really well. It encouraged them to hire new people. Now, it would be the reverse of that, if that is possible. I'm sure you have more expertise than I do on that.

I want to answer the first question you asked, but in a different way. It's true that in Alberta there's a lot of negative unemployment. You have too many jobs and not enough people to fill them and so on. Recently, I was looking over Statistics Canada numbers, and surprisingly, Alberta has the lowest participation of women in the workforce. I said, no, no, no, they have it wrong. So I looked twice, and it's true. Apparently, Quebec has the highest participation of women in the labour force. The reason is very easy--it took me two pages to find it--the day care system.

There are factors in the market that work differently than just a job offer. The day care system in Quebec--and I'm not going to say whether it's good or bad, it's just the way it is--encourages women to go back to work much sooner after they have children. Alberta doesn't have that, and a lot of women still tend to stay at home. It was really surprising to see that the province that has all these great, well-paying jobs still can't motivate those people to come into the labour market.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

But there are other reasons for that.