Thank you for the question.
I think we need an overall strategy that really prioritizes training, learning, and so forth. I'll touch on a couple of things.
The Red Seal program is a national program and is internationally recognized. It means that anybody who has a Red Seal certificate in a skilled trade can go anywhere in Canada and around the world. One would think we would be striving for this as a country. Instead, that's not happening, and because it is in provincial jurisdictions, there are fragmentations taking place. I think reinvesting in and reinvigorating the Red Seal Program would be extremely important.
There is also the question of a training levy. I think that's something we could even look at through federal measures, and that would actually address one of the biggest issues. It's true that there is the perception that there's university or there's nothing, but when apprenticeships are posted, there's a huge demand, and there's all sorts of anecdotal evidence that the demand for apprenticeships actually exceeds the supply. Part of the reason is that employers are actually not creating the apprenticeship opportunities; for whatever reasons, they're not investing. They basically look at either bringing in people who are already trained or they look at people with only partial skills. There is an enforcement of regulations; for example, people can hire people who have a portion of a credential at a lower rate of pay, and employers are increasingly looking to those back-door approaches rather than actually wanting to pay skilled journey people, and so forth.
In the college and university systems, they pressure people to get out of the system. You know, no dilly-dallying around--get in, get out, get in, get out, and so forth. In the colleges, there's more and more reliance on certificate programs. In six weeks you can go and do lab technician or whatever, and this kind of fragmentation is actually not whole-person learning.
My own feeling is that we need a national education act that would take the three pillars of post-secondary education--college, university, apprenticeship--and develop common standards, common credentials, and so forth, and really invest in education and lifelong learning. From literacy to English as a second language training, all of those investments pay back several times over. In fact, I was just reading in a study that even investment in apprenticeships gives something like a 400% return on every dollar invested, so that within three or four years, investment in apprenticeship is essentially more or less free.