Human Resources Committee on Nov. 10th, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are going to commence our study on employability in Canada.

I want to state that this is the last stop on our tour. I want, just for the record, to thank the staff for all their very hard work in making these meetings very successful. I want to thank them, because it seems that we need a lot more of them to make us look good as MPs. It is just the way it is. They have their work cut out for them, I can assure you of that.

I want to let you know that there will be seven minutes for opening statements. There will be two rounds: seven minutes of questions and answers and then five minutes. If you are not able to get to all of your presentation done, you should be able to answer with the questions.

If I could, we'll have Mr. Bort and Ms. Duncan. Ms. Bev Duncan will be speaking. Thank you for being here today.

[Bev Duncan, Executive Director, Provincial Interagency Network on Disability (PIND)]

I represent the Provincial Interagency Network on Disability. I am also the executive director of Saskatchewan Voice of People with Disabilities, and Ron Bort is my provincial president.

First I will define the definition of disability, and then I will touch on the barriers that people with disabilities encounter when seeking employment. Finally, I have a number of recommendations that I will present.

For your information, I am going to present you with a disability action plan from Saskatchewan. I will also refer to the “In Unison: A Canadian Approach to Disability Issues” document of 2000 that was presented by the federal-provincial-territorial ministers responsible for social services.

The Disability Discrimination Act defines a person with a disability as someone who has a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on his or her ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities. In Saskatchewan, approximately 70% of all persons on social assistance have disabilities; 19.2% of our population have disabilities; and we're guestimating that by 2010, 25% of the population in Saskatchewan will have some forms of disabilities. The unemployment rate for people with disabilities in Saskatchewan is 29%.

Transportation is a big barrier. It's not available in all areas; the hours of service do not always coincide with employment; the cost is higher than regular service; and the system is overextended in urban centres, where it is available.

On referral services, in Saskatchewan there is a call centre, and all persons wanting to access employment or social assistance have to use that system. Once you're through the call centre, it is necessary to meet a vocational counsellor at CanSask, who will first send you to the Saskatchewan Abilities Council for a vocational assessment. This assessment costs approximately $1,800 and is paid for by the government. After the information is obtained, people with disabilities apparently have a wait time of approximately three months to access service.

After an assessment is completed, the person with the disability returns to the vocational counsellor at CanSask, who then refers them to one of two services in Regina--the South Saskatchewan Independent Living Centre, or Partners In Employment, which is also an affiliate of the Saskatchewan Abilities Council.

In Saskatoon there is only one centre, which is Partners In Employment. We did have a SEARCHs here, an employment service, but through the opportunities fund, the funding was cut. The person with the disability requires a vocational assessment to assess service to go through Partners In Employment, and there are no other services.

The vocational counsellor directs the disabled person to the service. We have been told that folks do not have a choice of what they want to take, and are told where to go. The same holds true for referrals. Any referrals for service from other community-based organizations have to go through CanSask and must abide by the above regulations before accessing service.

According to a report filed from Saskatoon, there are 43 companies in the Saskatoon area that offer products, programming, and services to people with disabilities. There are also countless agencies that specialize in specific disabilities, such as Epilepsy Saskatoon, the Saskatchewan Deaf and Hard of Hearing Services Inc., and CNIB. It is estimated that there are at least 200 organizations in the province that offer programming and services to people with disabilities.

In Saskatoon, what we see as limiting people with disabilities is not their impairment; it is how society reacts to the person and does not accommodate disabled people. The failure to accommodate may stem from the public's apparent lack of knowledge about people with disabilities.

System barriers. Government legislation provides no incentive to move from social assistance to employment in either full- or part-time low-paying positions. People are punished financially for attempting to work. There are no supports to assist the transition from social services to low-paid income. For example, if you receive a low-paying job you are automatically cut off social assistance. If you had an outstanding power bill from eight years ago it would be due. Those are issues.

Labour. Under government leadership, pay schedules are unequal. People with disabilities perform out-of-scope employment that pays less than people working in scope in the same position. We recognize that barriers to employment by unions is a tenuous issue. Apparently a job accommodation in a unionized environment does not have sufficient or mandated legislation to support employment programs for the disabled. There is a lack of career planning for students with disabilities in high schools.

There are a number of employment barriers. There are a number of provincial-federal funded programs that provide job skills for people with disabilities; however, after the training folks have no places to assist them in finding jobs they have been trained to do.

On social barriers, one of the difficulties of breaking the barriers in large and small businesses in Saskatchewan is the attitude of employers and employees. Over the years there have been awareness-building efforts for employers and employees. The most popular effort was the National Access Awareness Week, which was supported by both the federal and provincial governments. This program provided an educational tool that enabled employers the opportunity to learn about disability in a positive manner. There are still accommodation workshops being delivered; however, they are not publicly funded and are supported solely by community-based organizations.

Since the demise of the funding of these high-profile programs, there appears to be diminished interest and action on the part of business and government to support the issues and implement accommodations, work placements, and jobs for people with disabilities.

The Canada disability program has been revised recently and appears to be a very positive example of how transitional support systems can work. We support and encourage a system to assist people with disabilities access employment, and we encourage the return of an awareness week funded to support organizations to build incentives and activities.

We recommend a standardized, diversified entry system.

We recommend that the provincial government implement a system of standardized qualifications for programs and facilitators.

We recommend that the provincial government develop objectives and standards to produce standardized graduate certificates that meet the needs of today's employers.

We recommend that employers be included in the development of the content, and that universities recognize the need for embedded education for counsellors. There should also be a curriculum developed and implemented in high school.

We recommend that teachers and vocational counsellors in schools be trained in awareness and the skills needed to assist people with disabilities.

I'll leave it at that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Ms. Duncan.

Hopefully through our questions we'll be able to get out some of those other recommendations.

Mr. McKinlay, please.

[Ken McKinlay, Executive Director, Saskatchewan Home Builders' Association]

Thank you.

My name is Ken McKinlay, executive director of the Saskatchewan Home Builders' Association, or, to use our new name, Canadian Home Builders' Association--Saskatchewan.

The residential industry, I'm sure you've heard, is facing extreme shortages of skilled trades and entry-level employees in all areas. The industry includes both the new home industry and the renovation industry.

The residential construction industry accounts for 48% of total permit building values in the province of Saskatchewan, going back to 1950. Please remember that renovations are not tracked in a lot of permit systems, and therefore the industry likely accounts for well over 50% of the construction activity in the province and across Canada.

A shortage of employable persons in our industry has resulted in all industries competing to find people to fill vacancies and new positions. This market pressure and competition has resulted in price increases on consumers who buy new homes, renovate their homes, or sell existing homes.

The Saskatchewan market continues to be impacted by Alberta and the draw it has on our youth in the vision of great paying jobs. The land-of-opportunity draw from Alberta seems to be showing signs of discontent in many areas among many who have been drawn to that province. Builders in Saskatchewan are reporting that some homebuyers are coming back from Alberta or are building homes in order to live in Saskatchewan and travel to Alberta. Finally, something's happening in Alberta that's putting something back into our province.

A Sask Trends Monitor statistician here in our province presented a presentation to the Regina Home builders. He indicated that there are 25,900 unemployed persons in our province, but only 10,000 of those would be employable, and only if they've had some skills training to get back into the workforce. We have a very thin layer of people to draw from.

The apprenticeship system has been developed to serve the ICI sector. It has always served that sector. It is responding to restructuring the culture within to address our needs in the residential sector. It's a slow process to churn through redeveloping that system to our specialized trades in the residential system, but we are working on it.

Education and training are provincial government jurisdictions, but we certainly need a coherent integrated approach to Canada's skilled labour requirements. No one level of government has the capacity to address skilled labour shortages. Apprenticeship and many government departments all want statistics to base training requirements for funding on. The more meetings we have with current bodies that develop statistics, the more we start to realize they do not provide the depth of information needed by the industry or governments to make good decisions.

We believe Canada's education institutes, technical schools, and colleges are as frustrated as we are that Canada does not have a system that provides national recognition of residential trades and supports portability and transferability. We need a coordinated system here.

You received a brief earlier from the Canadian Home Builders, probably in Ottawa. We have an action plan therein, and we need to have that carried out. Right now, we are just left with working under the Construction Sector Council, and it's not a targeted enough approach.

Residential construction industry tradespeople specialize in many different trades than are currently recognized under the apprenticeship system. We've done occupational profiles on all of our trades; the home builders in each province have done this right across Canada. CHBA–Saskatchewan has worked for five years with Apprenticeship, and we have finally established the framer trade designation. Five years--we have on file with them the concrete former, interior finisher, and exterior finisher. It's a slow process.

Tradespeople in the residential construction industry work in a self-directed manner, which is a lot different from commercial. They must interpret and apply codes and standards to all levels of those specialties.

We're working with the construction sector, as I said, but it's not meeting all of our needs. Local associations are really working with high schools and building partnerships as fast as we can as an industry, in order to find methods of getting kids into our industry.

Certainly, we work with Construction Careers Regina and Construction Careers Saskatoon, which deal with the aboriginal groups and EI clients--we sit on their committees--to try to get those groups into our industry. Again, our industry is so different that we have to find a little different way of working with them. Regina placed forty aboriginals last year, but none of them stuck out there in the field.

We have produced brochures that I will try to get in to your staff.

The residential construction industry is the other half. We're behind the eight ball. Commercial has developed their training system. We now have to blend and find out how to have a training system within that culture, and we're scrambling. We have the action plan in front of the federal government, and the strategies are listed in my paper.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. McKinlay. I appreciate that.

We're going to move to our last presenter right now.

Mr. Hanley, for seven minutes, please.

[Mark Hanley, Management Consultant, Points West Management Consultants, Saskatchewan Labour Force Development Board]

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, thank you for listening to us today. My name is Mark Hanley. I'm a certified management consultant for Saskatchewan and a member of the Institute of Certified Management Consultants of Canada. As part of my consultancy, I'm also acting for the Saskatchewan Labour Force Development Board as its interim executive director during a period of restructuring, which my firm has led.

I want to do a number of things today. One is to praise the work of your committee. Thank you to the members of the committee for taking on this difficult challenge, because it requires the type of organization and strategic analysis that needs to be done by federal and provincial and other jurisdictions to make this thing work.

I want to table two documents today, and I noted from the previous session, which I caught a moment of, that the co-chair of the Saskatchewan Labour Force Development Board, Larry Hubich, who is the labour co-chair, and the business co-chair, who is a member of the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce, Holly Hetherington, have talked about these issues with you to some degree. So I won't belabour them.

I have two documents. One is the outcome of a very good piece of work that was done for us through the Canadian Labour and Business Centre and an organization called the Workplace Partners Panel that was established in Saskatchewan to deal with challenges and focus on priority topics associated with the challenges to bring more Saskatchewan people into the labour force and to deal with our long-term labour market issues. That's a document I've given to your clerks and it will be available to you.

The second one, which I want to dwell on for a moment longer, is why we think it's important to identify the need for a provincial labour market development organization. I won't go into the notion of skills shortages, because my friend Mr. McKinlay and the lady next to him have done a good job of talking about those things, as have others, I'm sure. But we know these things will continue to present major challenges for Saskatchewan and other jurisdictions in Canada. Indeed, they'll be the major economic issues Saskatchewan will face over the next decade.

So what are we saying in response to this from an industry point of view? We know very well very few provinces, including Saskatchewan, have an active labour market development strategy. And while there are a number of agencies impacting on the labour market, no single agency has responsibility for coordinating labour market development toward agreed-upon targets or benchmarks. So there's a real need, in our case, for a provincial organization to connect the dots with Saskatchewan's labour market. Our Workplace Partners Panel, which was a broad-based panel representing industry--both labour and business--in the province noted it's best achieved through a partnership between labour, business, and government, and that in Saskatchewan there's a need for labour, business, and government to collectively tackle hot issues such as labour market competitiveness and image, productivity, the training system adequacy and capacity, youth engagement--when we say youth engagement it leads me to the next point of aboriginal engagement, because in Saskatchewan, youth equals aboriginal youth in the future--and also to our supply-demand imbalances that Mr. McKinlay referred to earlier.

We've determined that over a period of a year and working in consultation with business, labour, and government, a new model is going to be coming forward to be called the Saskatchewan labour market commission. It's very interesting to note that our discussions on this issue have taken place at very high levels throughout the province. We've spoken not just to the Government of Saskatchewan but also to the opposition parties. There's some strong convergence around the notion that the most critical role a labour market council or coordinating body or commission, if you like to call it that, can play is bringing various labour market partners together to advise elected officials and their bureaucrats in the employment and education sphere on how the province can best address its critical labour market issues.

Those are the things I wanted to leave you with today, and I wanted to leave these papers with you. I'm certainly interested in what you're doing here. We're very interested in the outcomes. I'm prepared to answer any questions you may have.

I should also say that as a volunteer, I am chairman of the Regina and District Food Bank, and we have developed some excellent employment readiness training programs. My message there is that it's very important for governments to recognize that community-based organizations offer a very strong solution to the opportunities to get marginalized workers back into the workforce. I think ample research has been done, particularly work done at the University of Manitoba, that detailed how the community-based sector can connect with marginalized workers, the type of people Ken mentioned in his presentation. As he noted, there are 10,000 or 15,000 heads of families who could be employed over the next five years if they had some skills upgrading and training.

Those are the messages I wanted to deliver today. Thank you very much for hearing us this morning.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Hanley, for your presentation.

What I would mention for those of you who present briefs later, just so that you are aware of this, is that they will be translated and distributed to all committee members.

We're going to start with the first round of questions. I'll turn it over to my colleague Mr. Regan for seven minutes.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

You mentioned that Ms. Duncan might have time during the questions and answers to say a little more about the recommendations. I'm going to give her the opportunity to do that now, and if I have time after that, I'll have some other questions.

Go ahead, please.

[Bev Duncan]

Basically, one of the things Mark had said was that we recommend that employers be involved in assisting us in developing standards that can be used for getting people with disabilities employed in our province. One of the things we find when employers talk about employment is that the whole disability community is basically ignored. They're not included in that discussion, and we're missing a whole segment of society that actually has some very good workers in it, and skilled workers, yet because of the myths that are around disabilities, we're not seeing that being utilized.

So one of the recommendations that we have certainly is to make sure that people with disabilities are included in the discussions when it comes to getting people employed.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

I think you'll be pleased to hear that among some of the business groups we've been hearing from, a number of them have actually raised the need for more support for people with disabilities to enable them to take part in the workforce. So it does seem to me there is a growing awareness in the business community, at least among the leaders of the organizations that are looking at these issues, that there is a need to understand the needs of people with disabilities and to include them in the workforce more and more. So it may have to permeate more throughout, but I think it's beginning, and that's an encouraging sign.

Let me ask you this. One of the points you talk about is the concern about how society reacts to a person with disabilities and doesn't accommodate that person. You're saying that one of the key problems is a lack of knowledge among the public. First of all, how can that be addressed, and secondly, what is the role of the Government of Canada, in your view, in addressing that? What are the top three things the Government of Canada should be doing?

[Bev Duncan]

Again, it comes back to the National Access Awareness Week that we had a number of years ago. It was actually started by the Man in Motion Tour with Rick Hansen, and it was endorsed by the Prime Minister at the time, Prime Minister Mulroney. What they did was provide dollars, funding dollars, limited funding dollars, to educate people within the community on how a person with a disability could actually participate. I know from being involved here from day one with this that we had employer awareness days. We invited employers to a sort of job fair. We had people with disabilities go out to employers and actually work with employers during a week that was set aside. In smaller communities, we actually did tours just so that people could understand what it was to have a disability and how they could actually work.

One of the things we've done is set up an accommodation guide for employers, and it was basically to get over some of the myths that employers have about hiring a person with a disability. So we put some accommodations in there and maybe helped get rid of some of the myths, so that it's not such a hard issue to hire someone with a disability.

We try to focus on seeing the ability, not the disability. I think it's something that we can do.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

I have other questions for other people, but I'll start with this anyway and carry on with you for a minute.

One of the suggestions we've heard is that we should get more employers to visit inclusive workplaces, where people with disabilities are involved, are working, so they can see what's happening, that it's working. How do you make that happen, in your view, and is that the right approach?

[Bev Duncan]

I think, first of all, we have to overcome the fact that not all people with disabilities are sick. Not all people with disabilities require someone to be a job shadow. The myth we have to overcome is that it's going to cost an employer a whole bunch of money just to change their workplace in order to accommodate someone--not necessarily.

I think those are things we have to overcome. Visiting job sites would be fine, but we have to take our provincial government, as a first employer, and see that they start employing more people with disabilities.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Let me turn to Mr. McKinlay and Mr. Hanley, if I have time, and ask you about the sector councils.

Mr. McKinlay, you talk about the Construction Sector Council not being a targeted enough approach. I think what you're saying is that there are so many different skills and trades involved that you need to break it down some more. But let me ask you about, generally across the country, the sector councils as a concept. That is one of the things we've seen cut recently. What is your view--and I'd like Mr. Hanley's as well--of the role of those organizations?

[Ken McKinlay]

I'm the co-chair of the Construction Sector Council labour market information committee in Saskatchewan, along with my counterpart from the commercial sector. I'm also the representative on the Construction Sector Council new home building and renovation labour market information national committee, and we're working hard really at trying to develop instruments that identify need for our future.

I'm looking at how to survey our employers properly to get the information we need to go to the school systems and identify the real need out there for training. In housing, we're into a pilot project, but what we're working on is really an extensive series of products that would go into the cost estimators to work with all these specialty trades to say how many man-hours it takes, how many framer man-hours as a specific, in this type of product, on site, and go through all the trades that way and identify, then, the labour component per unit.

Working with CMHC, as we do all the time, we can forecast the volumes we're probably going to produce in each province. And if we can identify it by that type of selected individual number of man-hours for each of our specialty trades on a site, in a townhouse product, in a single-family product, in a two-storey product, it's a much more accurate approach. It's a massive task, and we're doing that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

That's all the time we have, but Mr. Hanley, did you want to add a comment to that?

[Mark Hanley]

The point raised is a good one. The sector councils are integral to the notion of determining what the future needs are in terms of the supply side, but the problem we have in a province like Saskatchewan—and I think this is quite a common problem throughout the rest of Canada as well—is that while there are a number of agencies impacting the labour market, there's no single agency that has responsibility for coordinating labour market development issues. We're very excited, as proponents of an industry partnership, to provide advice to the province on how to strategically organize. That will be a good role, and I take this in the broadest possible context--the ability of this organization, through membership of senior people in industry who can provide high-level analysis of the labour market issues and labour market intelligence issues facing industry, as well as some of the things that my friend Bev spoke of earlier this morning about how to involve people who are marginalized from the labour market who can provide an extremely good resource to employers into the future, and how to mainstream the work that they're doing to make sure they become part of the economy.

We've had failure in doing that in our jurisdiction for many years. We've had an advisory committee of reference groups, including disabled persons, who were part of an advisory group to advise the Saskatchewan Labour Force Development Board, which is the old co. that we are replacing with the new co. One of the reasons their very good advice has not been particularly terribly effective is that we had no strategic organizational structure. Our training system has been under review, and now that review is reaching its end and coming to some conclusions about how the training system should be organized. The other side of it is that we're in a position now, through the Saskatchewan labour market commission, to offer those organizations a much higher-level organizing structure with excellent resources to do the research that is necessary to provide that to business leaders and labour leaders in our industry partnership, to overcome the barriers that marginalized people have, to bring them back into the labour market, or to get them into the labour market for the first time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

Quite quickly--

[Mark Hanley]

If I could respond to the earlier comment made by Mr. Regan, I believe it was, on the three most important things the federal government can do, frankly, those things are a single-window entry system; a strategic coordination with the provinces, leaving aside partisan distractions over how to solve these labour market issue problems; and finally, instilling some form of funding stability in federal government programs, because in the past they have often been too ephemeral to offer appropriate long-term, stable resources to help the labour market sector partners and individual organizations, such as the one Bev spoke about, to move forward with their agenda.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

We're going to Monsieur Lessard, pour sept minutes, s'il vous plaît.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I too want to thank you for joining us this morning and for sharing your experiences and your recommendations with us.

My first questions are for Mr. McKinlay. In your presentation, you talked about an integrated approach to education and training at the provincial and national levels. Can you elaborate further on your understanding of an integrated approach? As you know, manpower training is a provincial responsibility which the federal government helps fund through literacy and manpower programs, for example. Can you tell us a little more what you mean by an integrated approach?

[Ken McKinlay]

For our industry, in fact we have a national education and training committee at the Canadian Home Builders' level, in which reps from across the country get together and report on who's doing what in our residential industry, but that's from the standpoint of attacking our labour shortages.

We need, for all industries in all provinces, some vehicle that ties everything together. This is a large country, and when we start having Alberta--and Saskatchewan has been doing this for years--drawing on our youth, we in residential need to know where our supply of manpower for the future is going to be. There is getting to be a very short supply. Unless we have a cohesive national approach involving all governments and training facilities, our supply shortage is going to really damage the economies of different provinces.

Look at what's happening to Alberta. At our national committees in Ottawa last weekend, CMHC was showing all their charts. They're saying we now have to get another skill, because Alberta's up there and the rest of us aren't even on the chart anymore because of what's happening to their economy. Big companies in Alberta are simply finding avenues to fly people from here and there and all over, but we have to have a cohesive base for the training.

We sit in Ottawa as home builders, each talking about the problems we have with individual apprenticeship programs across the country. We are making headway here on this. Somebody else can't do that. Why is that happening? That's the type of thing.

Although they have a central body nationally for apprenticeship, it is not getting to the detail of what's happening in the field and the needs of the industry. The industry has to get better at defining the needs to the education system, but the education system has to get together cohesively and decide how best to get the people trained, and where and how many.

Right now everybody is under pressure. They should be training more everywhere.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

With respect to regulations and apprenticeship requirements for each trade, workers must first do an apprenticeship. They must log a certain number of hours during which they are evaluated. Following completion of their apprenticeship, they become accredited tradespersons, whether bricklayers, skilled labourers, etc. It's the same for all trades. Once the apprenticeship is completed, the person is formally recognized as a specialized tradesperson. Requirements differ from one province to another.

As far as you're concerned, does this harmonized approach extend to the training requirements for obtaining a trade license?

[Ken McKinlay]

The apprenticeship system for residential construction in our province does not recognize residential trades. They are just starting to do that. We're trying to build a system that is similar to Quebec's, where you have a journeyperson and a ratio of apprentices under them.

A good example is one of our utilities that goes to one of our electrical companies and hires two journeymen electricians away from them. There is a third one who leaves for Alberta. That's three journeypersons gone on a Friday. Come Monday morning, he has to let six apprentices go. He's wiped out a third of his company.

Ratio is a real problem right now. You have to be able to change ratios in a hurry, but you can't in this apprenticeship system. I mean, the unions will fight to the death that this ratio means something. It doesn't mean something when you can't supply people. It means nothing. You have to set the rules better and get checks in there.

Instead of one apprentice, a journeyperson should be allowed to have two or three, depending on process. The apprenticeship program should be able to react fast enough to make these changes to accommodate this situation.

That utility hires nothing but journeymen. Where is their social responsibility to hire apprentices? It ticks us off. They wipe out our private sector industry overnight in some of these companies. We need a collective approach so industry and large government-owned utilities play by the same rules.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Yes. Thank you for clarifying that for me.

During our round of meetings, a number of stakeholders talked to us about Aboriginal manpower that is underutilized and not well prepared to participate in the labour market. We're looking at ways of improving labour accessibility.

You made an interesting, eye-opening comment, based on your first-hand experience. You stated that you hired 40 Aboriginals to work in your area and that all of them subsequently quit.

Why did they quit their jobs?