Human Resources Committee on March 14th, 2012

[Carol Hughes, NDP, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Do I still have some time? Okay.

Throughout your presentation you really reinforced what we—our party as well as the labour movement—have been saying: people need living wages, and we need to be able to have employers ensure that if people want to upgrade their education, especially if there's a possibility that the place will be closing down at some point...that's extremely important in order to have better skills or for people to upgrade their skills.

The other thing is that when you're indicating the participation rate, I think it also reinforces the fact that the government stance on the OAS is actually not what it should be. It reinforces again the fact that we shouldn't have to worry about whether or not we can afford the OAS for our seniors.

I just wanted to throw that in there. Again, I'm just wondering if you can talk about the rural aspect and the remote aspects of where the challenges are sometimes.

[Michael McCracken]

I'll leave aside the OAS issue, because I don't think I mentioned it. It's outside the HR purview.

Now, let me make my comments brief. It's always a problem in rural Canada just getting the jobs there. There are some, with the construction jobs during resource development, etc., but it is tough, and unemployment rates tend to be higher in rural Canada.

Many of these remote areas that we speak of are dominated by aboriginal populations. They may be on reserves. It may be 50% to 60% aboriginal in a population area. That's another area where we need to do a lot, and we need to do it in a concentrated way. The potential is large.

On the practice of what we've been able to accomplish, there are a few good examples, but there are a lot of missed opportunities. It's a challenge, and obviously what you want to do in planning is to think about what it is that brings everyone along. But the policies appropriate for the 90% of people living in urban areas may not be what you want to use for the 10% of people in the rural areas.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you, Mr. McCracken.

We will move now to Mr. Daniel.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here.

My question is to Mr. McCracken.

[Michael McCracken]

You have to ask them questions too.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

I will shortly, so you have to keep your answer brief.

You talked about increasing wages and maximizing payments to employees, which is great. Has your group actually considered what the break point is in terms of competitiveness with the rest of the world?

[Michael McCracken]

Sure. I think most economists would say they expect wages to track productivity growth. That is, you would have a 10% increase in wages if your productivity went up by 10%. Historically that's what it looked like until about 1980 in Canada and the U.S. Since that time a gap has been opening, where productivity has been going up, but wages in real terms have not. That hasn't suddenly adjusted. It's still there, and it's staying high.

It's partly staying high because we've been running a higher unemployment rate than we had historically prior to 1979. It's a question of power, when you get right down to it, and that's how you try to write it. But that's the measure people would use who are worried about competitiveness.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Have you looked at it from a global competitive basis? How does Canada stack up against this productivity that's going to be exported to the rest of the world?

Please be very brief so I can ask the other person a question.

[Michael McCracken]

If it's a global issue like that, your exchange rate should make your adjustment for you. You shouldn't be trying to do it through your micro policies. You shouldn't do it by screwing one group in your society for the benefit of another. It's why exchange rates exist, and how they work and how they are determined. They should bring about equilibrium on the relative productivity or competitiveness level.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Thank you.

For the Statistics Canada folks, chart 4 shows us the breakdown by province. Chart 5 shows us the breakdown by skills. Does this apply equally across each of the provinces? Do you have statistics based on the skill sets for each province?

[Tracey Leesti]

We do have that. Chart 5 shows the unemployment rate by occupation group across Canada.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

It doesn't apply to each of the provinces directly.

[Tracey Leesti]

We do have it by province, but we don't have it with us.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Can you make it available to us?

[Tracey Leesti]

Yes. We can send that to you.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Chart 8 shows that immigrants are filling a lot of the moderate skilled jobs, even though they are university graduates. Have you considered the reasons for that? For example, is there anything to do with credential recognition in the statistics?

[Josée Bégin]

We don't have any data to explain the possible factors on that.

[Tracey Leesti]

We did a study a number of years back called the longitudinal survey of immigrants in Canada. There were questions on barriers to employment. Among some of the highest indicated were foreign credential recognition and lack of Canadian work experience. That survey is a couple of years old. I think it was from 2006 or 2008. There hasn't been a more recent replication of that one.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

So there's no easy way to correlate what each province's needs are from the charts you've given us. Is that what we can conclude here?

[Tracey Leesti]

In what sense do you mean?

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

I mean in terms of where the biggest job vacancies are in Alberta versus Ontario.

[Tracey Leesti]

It's a fairly new data source, so we don't have a full year of data or trend data. But we could break down this chart for you by industry.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

A breakdown by skill set is what I was thinking of.

[Tracey Leesti]

We don't have it by skill set; we have it by industry.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Do you also have a breakdown statistically to show by industry what skills are available in each province—in other words, people who are unemployed and have particular industry skills, by province?