Human Resources Committee on March 22nd, 2007

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

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

I want to thank our witnesses for being here today. We appreciate your flexibility in being able to reschedule. We had hoped to see you some time ago, but that didn't work out, so thank you for once again making the time to be here today.

Each organization will get seven minutes to present their case. Then we'll have five-minute rounds of questions because we have a tight schedule.

Today we have Ms. Lumsden, Mr. Kozij, and Mr. Gosselin from the Department of Human Resources and Social Development. Who's going to be speaking today?

Mr. Kozij, thank you, and welcome.

[John Kozij, Director, Aboriginal Strategic Policy, Aboriginal Affairs, Employment Programs Policy and Design, Department of Human Resources and Social Development]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable members of this committee. My name is John Kozij, and I am representing the Department of Human Resources and Social Development.

With me are Gerald Gosselin, a colleague from the aboriginal peoples directorate of Service Canada, and Marilyn Lumsden, who, like me, works for the aboriginal affairs directorate of HRSDC.

It's a pleasure to be here today to speak with you about aboriginal people and employability issues in Canada and to be part of this panel. I believe background information in the form of a deck has already been distributed to you, specifically a deck entitled “Aboriginal Labour Market Development: Demographic Overview, and HRSDC Aboriginal Labour Market Programs”. I'd not planned to walk through all the details of the deck, but rather to highlight some salient points to the discussion today.

Specifically, I want to paint a portrait for you of current issues and challenges with respect to greater aboriginal labour market participation, and secondly, the role of HRSDC, our aboriginal partners, in aboriginal labour market development.

To start, with the 2001 census as a guide, there are almost one million aboriginal people in Canada. This is a young population, and growing fast. This population experienced a growth rate of 22% between 1996 and 2001. If you compare that to the non-aboriginal population, it's quite dramatic, because that growth rate was only 4%. It is a young population with an average age of about 25 years old, compared to the Canadian average, which is about 37.

In labour market terms, in light of the young age of this population, the growth is most rapid for those of an age group who would be seeking their first jobs, their first skills training, and who also would be starting post-secondary education. Although Ontario has the largest aboriginal population for a province in Canada, over 60% of the aboriginal population is in the west, and that higher concentration of the aboriginal population in the west means that the aboriginal workforce will be a larger part of new entrants in the future, and increasingly important to the western labour force as a whole.

While the aboriginal labour force represents an untapped labour resource to help alleviate skills shortages, in some sectors and some regions there are also problems for this being realized. Aboriginal unemployment is almost three times higher than the national average, four times higher on-reserve and over two times higher off-reserve. The most important reason for higher levels of unemployment is education. Almost half the aboriginal population has less than high school education, compared to about 30% of the population as a whole in Canada. There is also a corresponding gap in literacy levels.

With every picture there are also the positives, though. Aboriginal participation rates—that is, the percentage of aboriginal people either working or actively looking for work—are not that much different from the Canadian average, about 61% to 64%. In addition, as a percentage, 16% of aboriginal people compared to 13% of non-aboriginal people are graduates of trade certificate programs. We can see, too, that the tightening of the labour market in the west has had a positive effect on off-reserve aboriginal labour market outcomes.

At the request of the Alberta government, Statistics Canada added questions to the monthly labour force survey that allowed aboriginal people off-reserve to be identified. While gaps do remain between the aboriginal and the non-aboriginal population, there were a number of positive findings. First, a robust Alberta economy produced strong labour market outcomes for aboriginal people. Second, the Métis had relative success in the labour market, with an unemployment rate of about 8%. Last, completion of post-secondary education was particularly important for aboriginal people since it dramatically increased their chances of obtaining employment.

While there have been some sharp improvements over the years, the evidence from Alberta indicates no sharp improvements. In the off-reserve aboriginal labour market, there are enduring problems. It is those enduring problems and a recognition by the federal government that extra effort was required to improve the situation that led successive governments, starting in 1991, to support national-level efforts to improve labour market outcomes of aboriginal people.

Currently this support is manifested in three ways from our department.

First, the government supports the aboriginal human resources development strategy, or the AHRDS, as we like to call it. We're working with aboriginal organizations, 80 across the country. HRSDC helps to support aboriginal-run employment and training service platforms that assist aboriginal people to prepare for, find, get, and keep jobs.

Second, and complementary to the AHRDS, we support an aboriginal sector council that works with private sector organizations and other sector councils to promote aboriginal employment.

Last, we support the aboriginal skills and employment partnership initiative, or ASEP, as we call it, which seeks to maximize aboriginal employment in major economic development projects, with partnered support from the private sector and others.

These projects offer employment opportunities to aboriginal people in areas where they live and where a clear and present large economic opportunity is evident. With our aboriginal partners, the AHRDS helps more than 16,000 aboriginal people return to employment every year.

In Leo Tolstoy's book, Anna Karenina, he started famously by saying, “All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I think this is also true for aboriginal people who succeed and fail in the labour market. The reason that someone succeeds can largely be attributed to their education level and the state of the economy. The reasons for failure are as individual as the person who walks through our doors for assistance and needs special attention.

The AHRDS was created because we recognize that special attention is fundamental to success, and that programs of general application for all Canadians are not suitably flexible and sensitive enough to meet the needs of the aboriginal community. People such as Mr. Dinsdale of the National Association of Friendship Centres and Sherry Lewis of the Native Women's Association of Canada are counted among the AHRDS partners who we value to deliver results for aboriginal people by tailoring labour market programming to their needs.

As a concluding note of pertinence to this committee, in the budget this week additional support to ASEP was announced of $105 million over five years. This additional investment will more than double the size of the current program, and we anticipate this increase to ASEP will lead to 9,000 aboriginal people receiving skills training and 6,000 careers in major economic development projects.

Those are my opening remarks. I'd be happy to respond to any questions or comments from the honourable members.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Kozij.

Now we're going to move to Mr. Peter Dinsdale, from the National Association of Friendship Centres.

Mr. Dinsdale, you have seven minutes, sir.

[Peter Dinsdale, Executive Director, National Association of Friendship Centres]

Thank you very much.

Thank you to this committee for the opportunity to appear before you.

I've taken a brief look at your employability study so far. You've been going to a lot of places and hearing from a lot of people, so I hope you have something to add in the dialogue.

I'm here from the National Association of Friendship Centres. We are the national body for local friendship centres across Canada. There are currently 116 friendship centres, which are community agencies from coast to coast to coast all across this country. It's important to say at the outset that we are not a representative body. I don't claim to represent anyone other than the friendship centres that are members of ours. We serve all aboriginal people: first nations, both status and non-status; Métis people from all regions of Canada; and Inuit peoples, in large, medium, and small communities.

Friendship centres are gathering places of hope and refuge, places for aboriginal women to take their rightful place in leadership and governance in our agencies and our communities. They are places for our young people to access programming and to become engaged and empowered. They are places to celebrate our culture and places to heal. Often, in communities, friendship centres are where urban aboriginal people come when they're hungry, to access training when they need it, to start on a path towards a better life for themselves and their nation.

Last year in these friendship centres across Canada we provided over 1.1 million client services. Now, if someone came 10 times it would be counted as 10, I want to be clear on that, but we provide 1.1 million client services through those agencies. Collectively they are an impressive capacity to provide services to the often-forgotten population of urban aboriginal peoples. Many friendship centres are involved in employment and training programs. Across the country there are 119 employment and training programs found in friendship centres. They include things like the O-G initiative, the Ontario Federation of Indian Friendship Centres, and Grand River employment and training initiative, or O-GI for short, which is a part of the AHRDS process that was just described.

We hire summer students. We're involved in that process. Many centres are involved with provincial and municipal partnerships to waive subsidies to hire people with disabilities; to do employment and training programs, job creation programs, first nation AHRDS partnerships, life skills programs, etc. We're involved in a variety of different ways.

Through those programs we provide around 87,000 client services across the country. They have done this, for the most part, through piecing together local and regional relationships.

We aren't really a part of the formal national process for employment training or through AHRDS. When people come to our friendship centres from employment training services, we hope we provide something we've been calling the friendship centre advantage. Clients are able to access cultural programming, economic development programming, education, employment, families, food bank, health, housing, justice, language, culture, sports and recreation, and youth programming. It's through all these various programs that people in communities have better labour market outcomes. People don't come in just without a job; they come in needing training, food, healing, addictions counselling, and all kinds of things. Friendship centres are the types of agencies that can do that.

Clearly there's an advantage to working with people like us. I said at the outset that we're not involved in the AHRDS framework formally. Friendship centres have been involved previously, and some have been able to have relationships regionally or locally. I'm not really here today to talk about that—the exclusion, things we could do—I'm just here to talk about employability and our observations based on how we are involved.

We do have some thoughts about the existing framework. We don't think there's enough access for urban aboriginal people to programming. We believe there are some very specific urban access issues—that clients in the urban areas are directed to other agreement holders. If a first nation person comes here to Ottawa for a job, they are directed to another agency in order to get access to those benefits. This kind of integration is counter to what the Supreme Court found was a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and there have been other court decisions that reinforce this. The current delivery structure supports separate and non-integrated systems, and we need to get around that.

I think we need to think bigger. I think we know about the worker shortage that exists in this country, in the oil sands and elsewhere. We know these companies are flying workers from Mexico and from Newfoundland into Alberta to do jobs, literally flying over our communities. Both literally and figuratively, they're flying over first nations people to get to these jobs, and there's something fundamentally wrong about that.

The same is true in many industries across the country. If we can't get to the issues of grinding poverty, we aren't going to get to the issues through employment and training. We have to make sure there are ways of doing that.

We're advocating that we have partnerships with the Conference Board of Canada, with the sector councils, to identify employment training fields and priorities that are ready. In fact, we train directly for those areas. We know that in B.C. the manufacturing sector is booming, and partly because of the Olympics. In Alberta it's the resource industry, and in Ontario it's manufacturing; in the east it's natural gas, and in Quebec it's forestry. We should be employing and training people directly for these industries as opposed to having non-targeted strategies. All these industries require employees, and all these employees require supports. So we need to partner with the private sector and the trade unions to train aboriginal people. And friendship centres are excellent ways of doing that because of the friendship centre advantage.

We need to make sure that our social and human services are providing a blanket of services around those clients who come into our centres, for all the reasons I'm sure you're only too aware of. We need to make sure we're helping aboriginal people to fully participate in the opportunities this country affords and to be part of the solution.

Friendship centres are ready to be engaged, and we're looking forward to sharing this vision with this committee and with the department, when they're ready.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Dinsdale.

We're now going to move to Ms. Lewis, who's from the Native Women's Association of Canada.

Thank you for being here. You have seven minutes.

[Sherry Lewis, Executive Director, Native Women's Association of Canada]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Let me extend my thanks to all the members of this committee for the invitation to appear as a witness today to speak about employability issues in Canada, specifically concerning aboriginal women.

These issues are of great importance to me and the Native Women's Association of Canada. We are an AHRDA holder, but at this time, we are in a pot of money in which we enhance the AHRDA program. We don't access our fair share of that funding. With the enhancements we do put forward to address employability issues for women, we take a holistic approach and address the broader determinants of employment success.

Aboriginal women still experience the highest rates of violence in this country, have the lowest education levels and the largest number of children, and live in poverty. These broad determinants of employability success can be framed under three topics.

The first topic is the minimum education requirement. In order for there to be a systemic approach, the jurisdiction and control of lifelong learning must have a collaborative and strategic objective that includes all stakeholders. Aboriginal women must be assured that protections will be established that will respect, protect, and fulfill the rights of all aboriginal peoples in lifelong learning goals. Specifically, education at all levels must be culturally appropriate and controlled by aboriginal peoples, respecting gender, race, language, disability, and sexual orientation. To accomplish this, federal and provincial territorial governments need reform and activity transfers regarding jurisdictional control or the inclusion of aboriginal communities in educational institutions, including in child development programming.

Jurisdictions should evolve to include value learning, recognizing that learning happens via many non-traditional methods. This would clearly recognize culturally appropriate learning centres, teachings, and traditions. Currently, nearly half the aboriginal population has not obtained a high school certificate. This, in turn, leads to low-paying jobs, low possibilities for advancement and promotion, or dependency on government benefit programs. And the cycle of poverty is hard to break.

Therefore, we recommend the following: that national standards be developed for curriculum content on all on-reserve aboriginal school curricula; that government develop and encourage initiatives to implement an aboriginal studies curriculum, and that this curriculum be done by aboriginal peoples; articulated, accredited programs that integrate workplace and work practicums for advancement opportunities for women; that government support home work and nurture partnerships with college and university preparation courses for post-secondary studies; and that government increase financial support to continue and improve training initiatives, such as the aboriginal human resource development agreements, to upgrade skills.

The second topic is skilled worker shortages. Canada will face a skilled labour shortage as many Canadian baby boomers start retiring and the economy remains strong. At the same time, aboriginal people in Canada are the nation's youngest and fastest growing segment of the population. We must find a way to change the high percentage of unemployment for aboriginal people, utilizing both on- and non-reserve approaches. The aboriginal population is the largest untapped human resource in Canada, and we believe we can solve Canada's labour shortage.

Therefore, we recommend that opportunities and partnerships with corporations and industry leaders be developed and brought to the attention of aboriginal people through financial assistance for continuing education; that they are provided employment upon completion of their training or studies; and that government develops and markets to industry leaders a policy of inclusion of aboriginal people as a solution for skilled worker shortages.

Finally, our third topic is training and day care issues. Upon dissolution of marriage, women often have to upgrade their skills and education to re-enter the workforce and support their children. They usually have to travel to urban centres, where they lose their support network of extended family.

Aboriginal women lead the way in graduates when barriers are removed from education, training, and skills development opportunities. Aboriginal women also lead the way in terms of small business development when barriers are removed.

Our studies have found that child care and the costs of child care are difficult to access, and they are insufficient. This leads to single mothers having to carry the burden of child care on their own or having to receive government benefits and pass up the opportunities to train to re-enter the job market. Current initiatives do not have set-aside budgets for child care and limit the ability of aboriginal women to receive training by having such restrictive criteria.

Therefore, we recommend that all government initiatives regarding training, education, and/or skill upgrading include a budget allocation for child or dependant care; that all government initiatives remove restrictive criteria for aboriginal mothers who seek training or education to re-enter the job market; that government develops, in conjunction with aboriginal people, a national aboriginal child care program that would respond to the needs of aboriginal families, day care facilities, and child care policies that allow for at-home care, extended family support, and remuneration of child care.

It is clear that good programming for aboriginal women and their children has to vary according to their needs and needs their involvement in creating these programs. However, statistics send a clear message: with the high level of unemployment and poverty, combined with a very young population that has a high unemployment rate, aboriginals must become involved in the workforce to share in this economic prosperity.

I thank you, Mr. Chair, for your time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Ms. Lewis, for your presentation.

We're now going to move to our last presenter today. We have Mr. Brown, from the Association of Canadian Community Colleges.

Mr. Brown, you have seven minutes, sir.

[Gerald Brown, President, Association of Canadian Community Colleges]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for this opportunity to be with you this afternoon to discuss a very important subject.

The Association of Canadian Community Colleges wishes to congratulate the standing committee on undertaking a study on employability issues in Canada and providing the association with an opportunity to highlight several areas that we believe the committee should be addressing in its study.

As the national and international voice of Canada's 150 publicly funded colleges, institutes of technology, CEGEPs, and university colleges across Canada, a primary role of our institutions is to engage proactively as a first-line responder in response to their mandate to contribute to the economic and social development of the communities they serve. With campuses in well over 1,000 communities across Canada, 1.5 million full-time and part-time learners, and close to 60,000 professionals, our institutions play a pivotal role in the employer-, individual-, and government-funded skills training, and have traditionally been the implementers of federal training programs for the unemployed and aboriginal communities.

Specifically, the association and its member institutions recommend to the standing committee the following four recommendations.

First, the federal government must take the lead and move forward with governments, business, labour, educational institutions, and other community groups to develop and implement a comprehensive pan-Canadian workforce development strategy that will address the pressing skills gaps facing our nation and be inclusive of all Canadians. The time has come for all stakeholders to work together to develop a strategy that will encompass the needs of both the employed and the unemployed and recognize the diversity of individuals who need the opportunities for learning and training.

Increased skills requirements, rapid technology change, the demographics of an aging population, a smaller workforce, and a rapid decline in skilled workers throughout almost every industry result in skilled workers becoming an increasingly scarce commodity across our country. We cannot as a nation continue to ignore the realities of our current and future workforce and not seize this as an opportunity to assist the unemployed and disadvantaged segments of our populations. In particular, with our first nations—the only segment that is in a positive growth pattern and one of Canada's youngest segments—linking these communities with their local community colleges is a critical first step.

As for our second recommendation, the federal government must act now to reinvest in essential components of prosperity: the quality, capacity, and access to Canada's publicly funded post-secondary and skills systems. Canadian colleges and institutes represent a master key able to open the door to skills development for a diverse range of learners in all regions of our country.

In this context, however, we wish to acknowledge the federal government's announcements in the last budget. The transfers to the provinces for post-secondary education, as well as the $500 million per year over the next six years to address gaps in labour market programming support, are important steps that are certainly in the right direction. Colleges and institutes now urge the federal and provincial governments to collaborate in order to ensure that these transfer funds do indeed reach their intended targets.

Third, the association recommends the creation of a college institute access fund that would provide multifaceted learner support services and tools within the community, particularly in rural and remote communities, in disadvantaged groups that are in urban settings, and in aboriginal communities where the demand for skills and literacy development is of particular significance.

Creative and flexible training initiatives and support services will be required to meet the training needs of a diverse population. As Canada's largest skills trainer—there are 1.5 million learners in our institutions—we're well placed to address the skills gaps across the nation. Clearly, colleges and institutes must be at the forefront, working closely with the federal and provincial governments in developing future training strategies that will address skills shortages, meet the learning needs of a diverse student population, and contribute to the overall economic growth of our nation.

Finally, the association recommends the creation of a new learner support system that will reduce the complexities of existing systems; increase the access to post-secondary education and skills; address the concerns of aboriginal communities, immigrants, and other disadvantaged groups; and include grants for the first two years of post-secondary education.

In closing, I draw the attention of the standing committee to the documents we've submitted to you. In there you will see a report that addresses the way in which our institutions respond to the needs of our aboriginal learners and our immigrant learners. But in that document particularly, there's a graphic that really outlines how our institutions play a key role.

Thank you very much for this opportunity to be with you this afternoon. I await your questions with considerable interest.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Brown, for being here.

We're now going to start our first round.

Mr. Savage is next for five minutes, please.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you, Chair.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for coming today. They were good presentations, and helpful in our study.

I'd like to start with you, Mr. Brown. It's good to see you again, and I thank you for coming out.

The community college network in Canada is going to be even more important going forward than it has been so far, as we try to meet the skills needs of Canadians and of the workplace. In my own province of Nova Scotia, the community college network has really improved in the last decade, largely under the leadership of Ray Ivany, whom I'm sure you know, and now Joan McArthur-Blair. In fact, tomorrow afternoon I'm going to have a tour of the as yet unopened new community college home-based campus in my riding of Dartmouth. It's going to be one of the most impressive post-secondary institutions in the country, community college, university, or otherwise, and I'm very excited about that.

Community colleges have had a beef, and it's a fair beef, I think. I'm not sure if you're prepared to say this, but I think they've been underfunded compared to universities, and in a lot of ways, such as in percentage of operating funds and certainly in terms of research. Community colleges are doing a great deal of applied research, and they can do more.

With this $800 million that has been proposed to go for post-secondary education, I wonder if you're prepared to give me a sense of how much of that should go to the community colleges?

[Gerald Brown]

All of it.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

All right, then here's my next question. How much would you expect?

[Gerald Brown]

First of all, thank you very much for those comments. In fact, by those comments, you've certainly convinced me that you have a good sense of what our institutions are all about. In fact, I would say that your colleges and your institutes and your CEGEPs are probably Canada's best-kept secret. And you're right, we haven't necessarily taxed them to the best ability that we have.

Traditionally, funding at the post-secondary level has always leaned quite significantly toward the universities, as you said, both in the applied research fund and just in the very role that we have, which is preparing skills training.

We're optimistic now that more and more people like you are increasingly aware of the role that we play in our institutions. People are familiar with our institutions and are working closely with our institutions. As we mentioned a few moments ago, we hope that as the money does in fact travel in all these Brinks trucks across the 13 jurisdictions in Canada, and as it begins to be distributed in the provinces, our institutions will, at that very least, get their fair share.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

A lot of people have called for a dedicated transfer for post-secondary education, as we did with health care, a carving out of the percentage of money that should go for post-secondary education. A lot of people think there need to be stipulations on that money. In other words, before the money flows, there needs to be a pan-Canadian discussion that comes to some priority areas, whether we're talking about student access, infrastructure, or operating funds.

Is that the view of the community colleges as well?

[Gerald Brown]

Absolutely. We've been on record for the last six years, before the finance parliamentary committee, about the importance of, one, increasing the funding; and two, targeting it. It's very important to target it, because that way we have the greatest sense of how it can move forward.

There are probably some lessons to be learned from the health accord. We could draw upon those lessons, but for us, from the point of view of the community colleges, our position has always been strong and very clear on that. In fact, we would welcome the opportunity to have priorities established, and accountability measures to go with them.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

One of the issues that I think are most important is the issue of accessibility. We talk a bit about this when we talk about aboriginal Canadians. We could also talk about persons with disabilities, as well as low-income families. Those are areas where we haven't closed the gap in terms of participation and enrolment, in community college to a lesser extent, but in university in particular.

I'm probably running out of time, but let me ask you a reasonably specific question on the accessibility front. The Millennium Scholarship Foundation is open to community colleges as well as to universities. I wonder if you'd give us an opinion on the millennium scholarship. I think 2008-09 is when it will need to be replenished, and I wonder what your view is on the millennium scholarship.

[Gerald Brown]

Actually, we're quite concerned about what the future of that is going to be. As you know, close to $350 million is invested in learner assistance and is targeted very much to the neediest, so it is more than likely touching upon many of the areas this committee would be concerned about, like aboriginal communities, immigrants, and the disadvantaged. As we move forward in the next 12 to 18 months, we certainly hope we do in fact ensure that the funds that have been available through the millennium fund continue to be available.

Whether it's with the millennium fund or not, I think that's a legitimate debate that everybody needs to have. I will say that over the years, at the beginning of all of this, the millennium foundation was probably one of the foundations most hated by the provinces. It is now most loved by the provinces, probably for obvious reasons. So we may not have to reinvent the wheel here, but simply refine it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

We're now going to move to Mr. Lessard, five minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I want to thank our guests for their contribution to our proceedings.

Ms. Lewis, if I understand correctly, your organization represents non-status Métis women across Canada. Is that correct?

[Sherry Lewis]

That's correct: first nations, Métis, non-status women, and we partner with Pauktuutit Inuit Women of Canada to address Inuit women's needs.

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

This particularly concerns women from urban areas, if I understand correctly.

[Sherry Lewis]

Yes, our primary focus is in urban centres.

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

The department's statistics show a higher unemployment rate among Aboriginal people. It's very perceptible. I believe that the rate is 28% on the reserves and 14% off reserves. Those rates are higher than those of other citizens; that's obvious.

Do you, or someone from the department, know the unemployment rate among Aboriginal women who would like to work?

[Sherry Lewis]

We have requested many times disaggregated data that show the rates specifically for aboriginal women, and we have not been successful in gaining that information.