Human Resources Committee on Oct. 26th, 2006

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

I have a question for each of you. I'll try to make them succinct, and then maybe we can get the answers in from each of you as well.

I want to start by saying to William and Judy, it's nice to see you again. We see you often, advocating on behalf of, I think, a very important group, given that I'm 58, and we need voices.

I think the bigger issue for me, anyway, is the whole question of poverty and seniors. You can have choice, but if there's no choice because it's the only way you can feed yourself and pay the rent and the increasing property taxes, then you have to go to work. I find a lot of seniors now working in jobs that really they don't want to be at. They're not happy. They're working at McDonald's; they're doing things that are difficult.

So I'm thinking we should be looking at bringing in a pension plan system across the country that's portable, that's sufficient, and that would allow people actually to retire in dignity and not have to work if they don't want to. In that way, it would allow some of our younger people to come and take some of those jobs that they would then vacate, and it would also allow some of the people who come in as temporary workers to become permanent workers and get good jobs that pay well and have a future in them.

Anyway, the question is, should we be doing more, particularly considering the amount of poverty out there among seniors these days?

[William Gleberzon]

Part of the problem--getting back to what Judy was saying about a holistic point of view--is that we believe the public pension system in its entirety needs to be reviewed, and reformed and increased.

For example, we're sitting on a powder keg. Immigrants who come to this country have to be here 40 continuous years before they're allowed to get old age security. We have a lot of immigrants who have come here much older than that, and that's something that I think really has to be reviewed, because as those people get to be 65 years of age, they're going to fall into the category that you've been talking about. So we're looking at something in the future, but it's those kinds of elements within our current public pension system that need to be properly attuned to the realities we're faced with.

The guaranteed income supplement is another one, because while there has been an increase in the guaranteed income supplement--the first in about 20 years--the amounts, in actual fact, are totally minimal. About one-third of our citizens live below the poverty line. Our public pension system--old age security, guaranteed income supplement, and some of them may get a bit of CPP, say, from a spouse or someone--guarantees that they will not live in dire poverty, but they will not live above the low-income cut-off line. So we have to review the entire system that exists.

Secondly, we have been advocating and in fact in the former government the Minister of State responsible for seniors advocated a band above the low-income cut-off line that seniors could receive through working, without endangering the guaranteed income supplement. I believe the band that had been recommended was around $2,000 or $3,000, and we said the same. It's not to force people to work, but if they have to work to augment their income, they should not lose the benefits they have--and they very well might, because if they get money above the low-income cut-off line, they lose fifty cents for every dollar they get.

So our system is not designed to meet the kinds of challenges you're talking about, and those challenges won't go away in the future, because a lot of people work part-time on an almost full-time basis, so they don't have pensions. All they will be dependent on is the public pension system. So we're hopeful that when this committee is established by the Senate it will look at the kinds of issues you're talking about as part of the overall picture that has to be reviewed in the country.

[Judy Cutler]

As a kind of basis for what you're asking, governments tend to look at how much money is going out to seniors, and never look at the other side of the equation of how much comes back in income tax and GST into the economy. So it's a very skewed perspective to not do that.

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

To the group from OISE, I heard what you said about there not being a problem with skills shortage but there's a problem with transmission. I've been referring to it as a bit of a disconnect.

I have young people in my community who want to work and are going out there getting the skills, but they're not able to get into the workplace to get the apprenticeship they need to give them the credentials. So I'd like you to comment further on that. What do we need to do to get that socket plugged into that wall unit, or whatever?

On top of that is the whole question of the social economy and our under-appreciation of it in this country, when you compare it to other jurisdictions around the world. This government has now cut $39 million out of an initiative that was put out by the previous government to actually invest in the social economy.

[Karen Lior]

Those are two little questions.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Karen Lior]

The Canadian Apprenticeship Forum two years ago released a study called “Accessing and Completing Apprenticeship Training in Canada: Perceptions of Barriers”. There are a few problems with apprenticeships overall.

One problem is that there is no coherent apprenticeship system in Canada. So you can be an electrician in Ontario, but if you want to go to B.C. to work in construction for the Olympics, your trade or your qualifications may not be recognized. So the fact that apprenticeship is balkanized and provincialized makes it very difficult for apprentices and journey-persons to move. It makes it hard to recognize skills, and it speaks again to the skills shortage. Whether it's skills shortage or people shortage, I don't know the answer to that question.

Another problem with apprentices is that you can go to a college and do your training, but you will have great difficulty finding an employer. Even though you have great training and you may be certified in your trade, the barrier is that employers don't see apprenticeship as an investment; they see it as a cost.

Another recent study from the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum on the return of training investment shows that for every dollar spent on training an apprentice you get $1.38 back. So it is an investment and there's a return on your investment. But we need to change the mindset, the paradigm around training apprentices, find ways to encourage support and allow employers to hire apprentices, and not see them as a drain on their resources.

We have a whole lack of a culture of training in Canada. In OECD surveys that come out, we're usually somewhere between 23 and 26 among developed countries in what we invest in training our workers. Many employers have a perception that their workers are supposed to arrive completely trained and ready to do the job. Who's supposed to supply that training remains a question. So that's another shift we need to make.

Everybody wants to be a carpenter or an electrician, and the trades we need people to move into are less sexy or less popular. We need to find ways to encourage parents to understand that the trades are incredibly lucrative. Would I be happy if my children had gone into the trades and could support me in my old age so I wouldn't have to worry about retiring--which I can't do because I'm still paying their university fees? Yes, I would be really happy if they had become tradespeople. I have an actor and a dancer. I'm going to be paying for them forever. But we need to find ways to make it easy for school counsellors to encourage kids to go into apprenticeships--to find opportunities to introduce kids to the trades as sexy.

I once said to a group of tradespeople who wanted to know how to get junior high school girls into the trades: You have a TV commercial that shows this woman emerge in her welding outfit; she pulls off her helmet, takes off her goggles, and her glorious hair falls out. She says, “I welded that whole piece without breaking a nail.” They said that was so unfeminine. I said, “You want to get junior high school girls--there's the makeup counter.”

We need to change the way we talk about the trades, and we need to make opportunities for people. We need to support employers to be able to hire apprentices. We need to see them as an investment.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

It's almost time, but did you want one quick question?

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

Yes, and maybe we'll talk about the social economy another time.

On the migrant worker piece, I was in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago doing some forums on poverty and discovered there that folks are bringing in illegal workers, housing them illegally, and paying them $3 and $4 an hour to do work that Canadians would get paid $25 to $30 an hour to do. I note you have organized labour in your group. I know from them there's some resistance to that because it creates unfair competition in the country. How do you deal with that?

[Veena Verma]

One of our recommendations is regularization of workers when they're here. We don't like to talk about people being illegal, but that they don't have status. Many of the workers are coming with strong labour and social attachments in Canada. We believe they should be regularized, and there should be clampdowns on those types of employers. They should be coming in legally and they should be given opportunities to come in legally. Why are they coming in illegally? It's because low-skilled workers find it close to impossible to get into Canada. As you've probably been hearing for days now, you've got doctors and lawyers from abroad coming in as taxi drivers, but we don't bring in agricultural workers or live-in caregivers with full landed status. Why not? Why do they have to come in through temporary programs?

I want to make one comment in terms of the low-skilled worker and the decline in apprenticeships. This wasn't asked of me directly, but also note that the low-skilled worker pilot project, which I understand may not even be a pilot any longer, is being used to bring in construction workers and is replacing apprenticeship programs. The apprenticeship programs are going down because employers are bringing in foreign temporary labour to fill that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Martin. That's all the time we have.

On a point of clarification, Bill, you talked about how you couldn't qualify the people who had to work 40 years. I was under the impression it takes 40 years to get the full CPP/OAS.

[William Gleberzon]

That's correct, but when you think about what the full amount is, you're talking about not a lot of money left over at the end of the day.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, I appreciate that.

Last person in this round, Mr. Albrecht, for seven minutes please.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Again, thanks to each of the witnesses for coming today.

I wanted to follow up on one of my main concerns or passions, the whole area of skilled workers. I don't want to put them in competition with university grads, but certainly one of my concerns is how we can raise the apparent value of people in the skilled trades. I'm glad you've already identified some of your ideas on that.

I want to clarify one thing about national standards. I'm no expert on this, so I need your clarification, but I thought there was a program nationally, the red seal program, that recognizes many trades. Is that a very small percentage? Could you help me with that?

[Karen Lior]

The red seal program recognizes 47 trades. In Ontario we have over 140 trades.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

About one-third of them.

My second question relates to credentials for immigrants. Is the problem with foreign credentials more acute in certain professions, and are those professions themselves sometimes the barrier to accessing those credentials? For example, in health professions and those sorts of things, are we facing serious obstacles at the professional organizational level that create those barriers?

[Karen Lior]

Yes and no. Some of the professional associations, the medical associations, act as gatekeepers. The accountants have been better. Bonnie was here before, and some of them have really good programs to recognize prior credentials. Bill 124 in Ontario, which has just been introduced, takes a step toward ameliorating that situation.

We bring in people and ask them what their professions are and then they can't work. It's not only the professional associations, it's the whole system of before you choose to come to Canada, en route to Canada, what happens to you when you get to Canada, and then who we choose to recognize and who we don't. We choose to recognize certain professions. Tradespeople who come in also can't work.

It speaks to the whole lack of a coordinated coherent labour market policy that includes our immigration policy. We address it piecemeal instead of taking on the whole issue, which I understand is huge, but we do ourselves a disservice.

[Peter Sawchuk]

The notion of having a federal-provincial-territorial intergovernmental working group on the links between immigration and the labour market is an absolute no-brainer. We have them on lots of different issues that are cross-jurisdictional, such as taxation, aboriginal issues, environment. The ministers of labour have met on this, and this is a key linkage. We could say that about lifelong learning work generally, but that's an important thing to look toward. Rewarding the occupational regulating bodies that are good citizens and doing the right thing is really important. That should send a strong message to the ones that aren't, and there are some that aren't.

[Karen Lior]

May I add one thing?

If you do your apprenticeship in Germany, your academic studies, the time you have taken to learn the theory is credited toward further academic study. So you can do your trade, you can become a journeyperson, practise, then move into post-secondary education and get a master's degree or a doctorate, and there's no repetition of your learning, which is totally not the case in Canada. So we need to fix those ladders, those access points.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

I have another question on the whole area of recognizing foreign credentials prior to arriving in Canada. How would you structure an organization, or what advice would you give the government, to minimize the frustration on the part of immigrants who came here with the understanding they were going to be recognized, and after ten years they're still driving a taxi, which is a very noble profession but not what they were trained for? How would you address that?

[Karen Lior]

I don't think there is any easy answer.

There is an organization called WES, World Education Services, in Toronto, which works with people to figure out ways to evaluate their credentials. I think you could have that kind of system in place, perhaps, in Canadian embassies and consulates in other countries, so people could have that done for them before they choose to come to Canada. Perhaps that would help.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

So there is an organization whose expertise we could possibly use. We don't need to start from ground zero.

[Karen Lior]

Quebec has a whole system in place, where they have done it for years. Alberta has a system. But the systems in the different provinces don't even talk to each other. Yes, there are systems in use.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Thank you.

I have a question to Ms. Verma on the third recommendation, in terms of a transparent impartial appeal process.

[Veena Verma]

Right.