Evidence of meeting #7 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was population.
Director, Culture, Tourism and the Centre for Education Statistics, Statistics Canada
Absolutely. You are quite right.
Director General, Labour and Household Surveys, Statistics Canada
Students who have a job are counted as individuals who are employed, workers. In this case we're talking about an individual who holds two jobs at the same time, for example, a job in the morning and another in the evening. Therefore, a student with two jobs would be counted. They can be identified and separated out.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Thank you. Thank you very much.
We'll move to the last part of this round.
Over to Ms. Yelich, seven minutes.
Conservative
Lynne Yelich Conservative Blackstrap, SK
Thank you. I think that was a good question because it leads up to my question.
I would like a further breakdown in all these inventories of labour that we have, the aboriginal, the disabled, etc. If we decide how we're going to work through committee employability, we have to have even more data to say, let's take these 600,000 disabled and find out where we can fit them in. I think you did wonderful work. The charts are absolutely excellent and a little scary. But they are excellent.
I would like you to take it a little bit further so that when we go out on the road we can see how we're going to attack the issue, especially with the disabled, which is going to be very important to me because of what I intend to do.
I also have another question. This is probably not a really good question, or not a nice question, for you, but it's the law that insists that you have to answer these labour surveys, isn't it? People are obligated to answer them. I do have people who get very angry when sometimes they're asked to answer these. The labour survey seems to be really intrusive to some. Or maybe it's not as intrusive as these people have led us to believe. But I want to know if there is any way out if you just find the person obnoxious, which I think one of your people might have had happen in my community. I do worry about that.
About that, which one do they have to do? Also, if there are other ones, do we have somewhere to go if we find that we're having difficulty with surveys or perhaps a conflict of personalities or something?
Director General, Labour and Household Surveys, Statistics Canada
On the first point you raised regarding additional information on aboriginal peoples or persons with disabilities and labour market integration, we'd be very happy—I know we just skimmed over the surface here—to provide further information in whatever form, whether it's—
Conservative
Lynne Yelich Conservative Blackstrap, SK
I want to know what we can target. When we start looking at skills training, we have to know more on language training and that sort of thing.
Director General, Labour and Household Surveys, Statistics Canada
We'd be happy to provide whatever further information you would consider useful.
On the issue of mandatory versus voluntary surveys, there are only two mandatory household surveys that we do. One is the census and the other is the labour force survey. The labour force survey is mandatory because it feeds into the estimates of national accounts. So we really need to have very solid numbers with respect to employment. That's the only one we do that way.
Once a person is selected for the labour force survey, they're in for six months. The first interview per person might take 10 minutes. After that there's only a limited amount of information collected at subsequent interviews. It basically works out to a couple of minutes of time, on average, for every subsequent interview. So it's not that burdensome a survey. We do everything we can to minimize the burden it causes, and we use that approach to actually....
Conservative
Lynne Yelich Conservative Blackstrap, SK
I have a real appreciation for your work, so I think they should fill it out.
Mr. Lake has a question.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB
I have a few questions to do with context, in a sense. I'm looking at a lot of this stuff and I'm wondering about historical context. For example, with the literacy rates and our ranking, is there a historical context to that? Are we improving?
Director, Culture, Tourism and the Centre for Education Statistics, Statistics Canada
That's a good question. I don't have the chart in front of me, but there are only six to seven countries on that chart. Those are the countries that have done the survey in 2003. It's the second time the survey has been conducted internationally, I guess. The first time was in 1994.
Over the period of 1994 to 1998, there were about 20 to 25 countries. If you look at the 1994 chart, Canada is doing okay, but it's not ahead of the pack. The Scandinavian countries, for instance, do a lot better in terms of their literacy, the literacy skills of their population.
We're able to compare 1994 to 2003, and one of the key results is that there was no change in the literacy skills of the population. The chart shows that about 42% of Canadians are below level 3, and it was about the same in 1993. So it's a bit worrisome, I guess.
Director, Culture, Tourism and the Centre for Education Statistics, Statistics Canada
Well, we would have hoped to have gains.
There are not enough countries now to really situate Canada, but hopefully there's a second wave of that survey that will take place this year. There will be five to six additional countries that will run an identical survey, so we'll be able to better situate where we are in a year or two, and maybe there will be another wave after. There are a couple of European countries that are going to run the survey. Australia and New Zealand are going to run the survey, so we'll be able to compare ourselves with those countries once they have their results. But by no means is Canada ahead. We're not bad, but we're not the first internationally.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB
Along those same lines of historical context, looking at the bottom slide on page 13, which has to do with persons with disabilities, I'm guessing that there's probably not a lot of historical data on this either.
Manager, Participation and Activity Limitation Survey, Statistics Canada
We have very limited data on persons with disabilities. We do post-census surveys, but because of international definitions--the whole question of defining a person with disability--we don't have a lot of time series information. We're actually doing another major survey this fall, which will provide us with some timelines. At the moment, we can sort of tell you about what happened in 2001, but not a lot in terms of change.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB
Okay, so going forward it would seem to be important to me that we would have these definitions and stick with them. Are the definitions structured in such a way that, going forward, we'll be able to accumulate some data?
Manager, Participation and Activity Limitation Survey, Statistics Canada
Exactly. Actually, it was a prime motivation for the survey this year. Our major goal in the survey was to provide five-year data to have an idea of what has happened, actually, over time. All of the decisions that have been made about the 2006 survey were predicated with the idea of maintaining some time series integrity.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Thank you. That ends the first round, so we're going to move into the second round of questioning, which will be five minutes for questions and answers.
Mr. McGuire, could you lead us off?
Liberal
Joe McGuire Liberal Egmont, PE
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
On page 9, the labour productivity gap between Canada and the U.S. has emerged. When did that emerge, and why has it emerged?
Manager, Current Economic Analysis, Statistics Canada
Basically, even taking that graph back into the 1980s, it's very much a recent phenomenon. Productivity over long periods of time is quite comparable in Canada and the U.S. So this gap that's opened up is remarkable.
It appears to be motivated by two things. On the one hand, the U.S. went through a recession in 2001 that we didn't, and they had to grapple with a high exchange rate earlier than Canada. So they've had very large productivity gains for a long time now, particularly in the manufacturing sector.
At the same time, our productivity, as you can see, levelled off in recent years, and in fact it was basically flat in 2003 and 2004 and began to increase last year.
Manager, Current Economic Analysis, Statistics Canada
Clearly productivity is related to a number of factors. The key ones are the quality of your workforce: the human resources skills they possess, the education they have, the amount of capital they have to work with--and that seems to be the main reason Canada is levelling off. Worker productivity per se didn't fall; workers had less capital to work with in this country, relative to the U.S. The U.S. invested a lot more, particularly in the ICT boom in the late 1990s and after 2000, and particularly a lot more in ICT equipment. Because investment is picking up in this country, you're starting to see productivity pick up in 2005; workers have more capital to work with in this country.
Frankly, with all the surveys we have of investment intentions and just looking at the projects you see in the oil sands and in building permits, there's every reason to think this investment boom will continue. That's probably the biggest part of the answer to boosting productivity in this country.
