As Peter said, I'm Karen Lior, and I'm the executive director of the Toronto Training Board, which is one of 21 local boards in the province of Ontario. We are governed by a volunteer board of directors representing seven labour market partners.
I'm going to talk about three things: the growing gap in labour markets, which is undermining Canadian civil society and creating barriers to economic and social integration; the fact that immigrants need systems that recognize their credentials and their off-shore experience and skills; and the fact that all workers need expanded and enforceable labour standards.
Canada is one of the few industrialized countries or developed nations that doesn't have an overall economic strategy, and it's one of the things that keep us from moving forward. My taxi driver yesterday was an accountant from Pakistan who is now back in school relearning all his accounting principles so he can practise in Canada. Things like that waste a lot of taxpayer dollars. Many of those who are working in the skilled trades, such as stone masons, bricklayers, carpenters, and those who operate heavy machinery, also do manual labour.
In case you're wondering, I'm going to jump around a little bit, because Peter said some of these things, and I'm going to be saying some other things.
The point I want to make about the skilled trades is that we make it difficult for people to get into the skilled trades. Fifty-two percent of this workforce is due to retire in the next 15 years. Their children, for a change, are not moving back into the skilled trades. They've gone on to other professions. Many of the trades have changed with the introduction of technology, which opens up opportunities for those who haven't considered going into the skilled trades, but we don't have the policies and programs in place to move people from high school or from university back into the skilled trades.
We talk about the three pillars of the educational system--college, university, and apprenticeship--but college and university have access routes between them, and apprenticeship stands on its own. We are one of the few nations in which apprenticeship is a solitude, one of our many solitudes.
Many of the new jobs we're seeing are part-time, low-paid, and part of the precarious workforce. We need labour standards that allow workers to get paid. In Toronto, there are millions of dollars owed to workers who have been hired by unethical employers and then let go, or who have employers who don't pay them. Over a million workers in the city of Toronto are living below the poverty level, and a third of those are families with children.
People with disabilities have very few opportunities to participate actively in the labour market. In our TOP survey--our trends, opportunities, and priorities survey--which we're doing now, people have written in questions about why we aren't addressing the issue of people with disabilities.
We need overall policies that allow people to move around in the same way that we allow goods and services to move around. There's a lot of mobility in the world around the globalization of goods and services, but we need the same kinds of policies so we can take advantage of the skills and expertise of our workers. We need policies that protect and encourage people's mobility, as well as product mobility. In order to compete in the global marketplace, we must find ways to use the skills and talents of all our workers. We need to understand that the security agenda is also a barrier to our economic agenda.
I think I'm just going to go to our conclusions.
We need policies that allow people, as I said, to move in and out of the labour force. We need policies that look at more than jobs. We need policies that look at overall sustainable livelihoods, that look at people as assets and not deficits, and not as something that needs to be fixed. We need policies that look at how people can help them fix what's wrong. . We need employment policies that are sensitive to the entirety of workers' lives. We need ways to allow women to go to work, to allow people with disabilities to go to work, and to allow all of us to be productive workers who participate in Canada's economic growth and productivity.
Thank you.