Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm not going to give you a single statistic because you're going to hear a lot of statistics from all the speakers throughout this meeting.
I have to tell you, though, that a few years back, Ed, you were one of our speakers at Inclusion Works, our national recruitment fair where aboriginal grads from across Canada attend a live recruitment fair with employers. I always remember some of the youth coming up to me and saying, “ You know, these members of Parliament, they're really human. They really seem to care.” You can be assured, ladies and gentlemen, I do tell them that here at the House of Commons, you are very human.
Let me start with my conclusion. Aboriginal people have always had a proud tradition of work. If you look in the trades, from the iron workers through all the skilled trades, aboriginal people have always worked as apprentices and continue to fill a very important void.
I was in Australia a few years back. When you think about the attitudes toward trades, they have the University of Queensland and they also have the Queensland University of Technology. People do encourage their children to go to university to get professional degrees as well as to get degrees and certificates in the trades.
I was a member of the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum for 10 years. One of the best things we did at that time was an advertising campaign in cinemas and theatres. There were three messages, one pitched to parents, one pitched to youth, and one pitched to employers. It was marketing. It was about how to change parents' attitudes toward the trades. It showcased youth choosing apprenticeships, choosing trades as a career, and how to encourage employers to invest in apprenticeships.
When you think about skills on a national level, is it a provincial area or a national area? If we were in Alberta today, the people in Alberta, especially in the oil sands, care as much about the skills in Newfoundland as they do in Alberta. Why is that? There's a direct flight every day from St. John's, Newfoundland to the oil sands and on those flights are skilled workers. This is a national issue and it needs national leadership.
Our work is with employers. I want to talk, not about apprenticeship youth but about the employers. I'll tell you a story about a friend of mine, Joe Bova. Joe Bova and I sit on CORCAN's national advisory committee. Joe is one of those employers you'll never read about in the Globe and Mail. He runs a construction company. He's a very successful guy. Four years ago he was desperate for bricklayers and construction workers. He always was reluctant to get involved in bringing skilled workers from abroad, but he got involved in Manitoba and he went to Germany and brought back 13 families at a cost of $20,000 a piece.
For the record, I'm pro-immigration. Even though I work and advocate for aboriginal people and employers, we do need immigrants because we're in a net negative growth market in this country and we need to be a country that is seen as an employer of choice for immigrants.
Joe gets back and he tells me that somewhere along the line there's a disconnect. He said that he lives in a city, Winnipeg, that has a high native population and a high youth unemployment rate. He lives in a province where some of these reserves match third world conditions. Part of the problem is youth who have a sense of entitlement and a poor work ethic. In part, it's the federal government because they transfer responsibility to the provinces and when disasters have occurred, they have never looked back. The third, in part, is that our own employers and labour unions have relied too much on government and we're not doing a good enough job raising our own labour force.
Joe was approached by a native elder, a friend of his, who told him a young man had gotten his daughter pregnant and the young man needed a job. He asked Joe if he would give the young man a job. The young guy's name was Mike. Mike showed up at the job site, all 110 pounds of him, and Joe said he was going to give this kid a chance but he didn't think he would make it to the end of the day. Well, he did make it to the end of the day and six months later, Mike, the 110-pound kid, was still working, and now he wanted to get an apprenticeship. So Joe phoned up the labour union and they said, “Sorry, there's no space here for training”. He phoned up Red River College and was told, “Sorry, there's no space here”.
Joe was so frustrated that he couldn't find a spot for Mike to get his apprenticeship schooling that he finally phoned some cabinet ministers and the Department of Labour and they finally found Mike a spot in Thompson, Manitoba.
Joe's frustration is one which I think many employers feel. What Joe was expressing was that in his own backyard there are 100,000 Mikes. Well, ladies and gentlemen, what I think we need is 100,000 Joe Bovas. We need 100,000 employers who see aboriginal people as a workforce solution and are prepared to invest. We need public sector investing. We need private sector investing.
That's the work that I see ahead of us. We have opportunities to take the fastest growing labour force in this country.... They do see apprenticeships as a career opportunity. They can be a solution to many of the skills shortages we have, but it's going to take the cooperation of governments, the private sector, and aboriginal people to make it happen.
Joe Bova and I serve on CORCAN. You talk about putting people to work; we have another group of people we have to put to work. They're the offenders. Each year, between 7,000 and 9,000 of them are released. They need a second chance. We need employers who are going to step up for that. There are 20% of these people who are aboriginal, so we need employers who are going to step up. We need to take every untapped labour market pool and put the people to work.
Speaking of work, I can only stay with you until 9:30; I have meetings at 10. We're headquartered in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, but I'm in our nation's capital at least once or twice a month. I'm pleased to be here.
