Human Resources Committee on Feb. 12th, 2013

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

I call the meeting to order. I see everyone is here.

We will have each of you present, and there will be questions and answers afterward.

Before I start, I want to alert the committee to a couple of points. One is that we would appreciate receiving suggestions for witnesses from you for our future study by the end of Thursday of this week.

I'd also like to inform you—and there will be a notice going out a little later today—that department officials will be appearing before the committee on Thursday with respect to Mr. Cleary's motion as amended, so keep that in mind.

With that, we will start with our presentations in this first panel. I'm not sure who will present first.

We have Mr. Kent MacDonald, president, from Algonquin College, if you're ready to go. Then we have Mr. David Corson, president of the Algonquin Students' Association. We'll conclude with Brigadier-General Gregory Matte from Helmets to Hardhats.

We'll start with Mr. Kent MacDonald. Go ahead.

[Dr. Kent MacDonald, President, Algonquin College]

Thank you very much.

Can you just confirm my time limit? Is it up to 10 minutes?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

We'd like to have you keep it to five to seven minutes, if you could.

[Dr. Kent MacDonald]

Thank you very much for the opportunity to share some of my thoughts with the group. This is certainly an important and timely topic for the Canadian college and polytechnic group. This topic is new, and not just for Canada: we're seeing it in the Richard report in the U.K. and we're seeing it in various states in the United States, so it is timely.

I also had an opportunity to review some of the comments made by previous speakers, so I've decided not to simply repeat those comments. When we look at this very topic, we can look at a number of tactical initiatives that I think governments should be considering, including tax incentives for employers, interprovincial mobility for students, apprenticeship enhancement, grants, and others, yet I would say that most of the answers that you're seeking are probably already available to this committee in other publications, including the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum and the Canadian Council of Directors of Apprenticeship.

To prevent some level of redundancy, what I thought I would do is take it to 10,000 feet from a president's perspective. Maybe that could be of some use to the committee.

Certainly, as a lifelong educator and now the president of a college, the question that I put before our faculty, staff, and industry partners whenever I have the opportunity to speak with them is, what does it truly mean to be educated in the 21st century?

The concept of apprenticeship goes back to medieval times, of course, and I think it's time for us to do a complete rethink on how we're doing that education. Depending on how we define apprenticeship, I would also suggest that for the people in this audience, be they educators, lawyers, orthopedic surgeons, or others, you too have had an opportunity for some level of apprenticeship as it has been defined.

I'll limit my comments to four quick points.

Number one is that last summer Bill Bradley, an impressive American senator, described in his book We Can All Do Better how there was a time in North America when we could use the analogy of an elevator. We could get on the elevator regardless of where we were in our social status in our communities, and if we worked hard enough and we got a few breaks, we could get off the elevator on maybe the second floor or the third floor, and if we were on the second or third floor, maybe we could get off on the fifth. He would argue that the elevator is broken in this country and in America, and that the one way we can ensure that people still have that social mobility is to find ways to educate more people, to democratize post-secondary education for more people.

However, I would suggest that in this country there is a myth around what it is that we're doing in higher education. I know that it's a provincial jurisdiction, but we need to have a deeper, richer conversation about what impacts higher education can have.

As I look around this room at the demographic, we could probably all think back to the 1970s and 1960s, when a hands-on, applied, trade-oriented education was one that was valued in our community. Somewhere through the 1980s and the 1990s, we started to give less value and less honour to that type of work. The challenge we have before us today as Canadians is to determine how we can bring honour and respect back into that level of work, as opposed to simply graduating with a credential and an education. I would suggest that a number of institutions, in particular those similar to Algonquin College, can play a significant role in that process.

I remember growing up in what once was referred to by Maclean's magazine as the poorest and least desirable community in this country to live in: New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. I have the dichotomy of now living in Ottawa but coming from New Glasgow, so to the top-ranked city from the lowest in the country....

I'm convinced that further investment within higher education, particularly in the college sector, will be the path to allow more young people to get into education, yet the challenge we have before us is that an educator like me has spent typically no time on a college campus.

Typically, we have done well enough in high school. We go to university and have an excellent learning experience there, and we go off to teachers' college. Nowhere am I exposed to the opportunities of what a Canadian college does. We are not the same as the American community college system; in fact, there are only six colleges out of the 150-plus in this country that are actually referred to as community colleges.

The question that I think we need to explore is this: how are we going to more deeply influence the influencers—those who determine where their child or their sister or brother may be going? We know fundamentally that the key influencer still is the parent, followed by teachers and guidance counsellors.

I will leave the committee with five points in the time I've been given here.

Using the influence and the power afforded to all of you in your particular roles, we need to have a significant shift in the way we educate educators in this country. The 50 faculties of education need to look differently at how they are preparing their teachers. I would suggest having mandatory internships at a college sector somewhere across the country. There are over 900 campuses. It should be quite easy to do.

The second—other people have already addressed this significantly at the committee—is to eliminate barriers. Many, many barriers exist, and I've given just one example in the materials I have left with the clerk for you to read.

The third one is that we must, as Canadians, break the myth of what constitutes effective higher education today. I would recommend establishing some type of long-term commitment to break the social status that absolutely exists when we talk about colleges and universities in this country. That must start to occur at a very young age. We have broken the myth on smoking. We have broken it around drinking and driving. Today in the country we're celebrating that we can have a conversation around mental health. We need to start to have the conversation about what is effective higher education and start to ask young people what it is they want to do to ensure a positive career.

The fourth one is that we need to shift from measuring our success as educators in terms of how many people we put into the system and start to have a conversation about how many are graduating. There are simply too many people not completing. That includes mostly under-represented groups—people with disabilities, aboriginals, and first-generation types of students.

Finally, I would strongly encourage you to take the time to read—I've left one of these for each of you—even the first three chapters of this book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. I think you'll find it enlightening in terms of possibly having some type of shift on how we must all look at education and how we value work in our community today.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you very much for that presentation and for the suggestions you've made. They're certainly very interesting.

We'll now go to Mr. Corson.

[David Corson, President, Algonquin College Students' Association]

Good morning, members of the committee. My name is David Corson. I'm the president of the Algonquin Students' Association. I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today and to express to you the concerns shared by students and the challenges they have faced.

To start off, this is our mission statement:

The Algonquin Students' Association will “create an environment that inspires a passion for student success”. Our primary focus, therefore, is to integrate campus life with campus academics for success.

However, a student defines his own success.

Historically, at the turn of the previous century, there was a system whereby skilled trades had, as a key component of their advancement, a master piece which showed their competency. In completing the project, they were able to display their skills while gaining personal pride. Since then, for a variety of reasons, there have been substantial changes in the way skilled trades workers are trained in Canada. We believe in some cases this has been an aid in diluting their perceived value.

Since the 1980s societal impressions have devalued skilled trades. This situation has been perpetuated through various media streams. It has played a role in bringing us to a critical shortage of skilled tradespeople. The students' association strongly supports the objective of the awareness and perception study conducted by skilled trades and apprenticeships to turn the current negative perception of skilled trades to one that is more positive and eventually to reposition skilled trades to being a first-choice career option in the minds of Canadian youth and their influencers, such as parents and educators.

The situation for skilled trades has been further challenged by the timing of career choices being presented to students. We support the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum's suggestion that Canada needs to engage its youth in an evaluative process to identify their competencies and match these to the realities of the job market. Awareness efforts are critical. Our experience has been that students are starting as young as grade 5 to make these choices with educators.

We support another objective of the same study: to further encourage employers to create, expand, and sustain career opportunities in the skilled trades for young Canadians. We believe that doing this will also directly improve the percentage of youth who are aware of all of the career opportunities in the skilled trades. In this vein, we see an opportunity for the federal government to further invest in and promote the federal skilled trades program.

As a side note, Algonquin is sending a carpenter to Leipzig, Germany, to represent us in the carpentry skills competition for the world. We take pride in that, but who knows? Has anyone heard of that? This is our point.

Through the challenges at the local, provincial, national, and world stages, we see an amazing opportunity to help change the movie that is playing in society's mind to one that is more positive for the skilled trades. It may not be the Olympics, but maybe it could be.

One of the barriers that prospective apprentices currently face is the multiple layers of administrative bureaucracy. There are four levels.

First is the employer. Prospective apprentices may have challenges securing an employer to train them, and I'll speak on that closer to the end.

Second, colleges do not currently intake apprenticeship applicants. They do for everyone else, and this creates a disconnect when students are contacting the college about start dates.

Then provincially—and I can speak only for Ontario—the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities will consult with the student and issue the notification of offer to him or her, instead of the student dealing with a user-friendly Ontario College Application Service process, so we have a two-tiered system. Employment Ontario may also provide up to $1,500 of taxable financial support to apprentices who are not eligible to receive employment insurance benefits once they've applied during in-school training.

The fourth level of bureaucracy is federal. At the federal government level, funding goes through the traditional HRSDC process, where available—see the previous point—with inherent delays when we can already map the student’s prospective path through training.

One recommendation we would like you to consider is to streamline the services. A prospective apprentice with an employer should be able to use an OCAS-type system to apply for apprenticeship training in Ontario with the MTCU, using that provincial model as an example.

The results of this process should be communicated to both the college and the applicant to help form the training bond and also to trigger a connection with the federal government to determine potential funding sources. Two of the federal initiatives that we support as examples are the apprenticeship incentive grant, the AIG, and the apprenticeship completion grant, or ACG, and we see an opportunity for the government to increase funding for both of these initiatives.

Now that we have the prospective apprentice trained, there is a further barrier in the lack of transferability of skills from province to province. In the spirit of the Bologna Accord, we believe there should be national standards for apprentices, like the Red Seal for journeymen, which allow for some, if not all, transferability of skills and education.

Labour mobility has until recently been defined quite narrowly, focusing on mobility post-certification. As a result, the labour mobility and transferability of apprenticeship training are not well understood. These would be best clarified, in our opinion, at a national level.

In closing, we believe that the skilled trades are a key driver to the economic success of Canada. In the tough economic times that we are currently in, employers are facing difficult choices as to whether to keep current staff training or to risk training new apprentices. It can therefore be difficult for the prospective apprentice to secure an employer to sponsor him or her. We believe that the federal government has the capacity to provide incentives to remove this barrier and benefit all Canadians. This removal of barriers, along with the other examples provided in this presentation, will assist those at the front line to be more efficient and to create a system that is more effective and attractive for apprentices in Canada.

I thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you for that presentation. We certainly appreciate hearing from you, and I'm sure you'll have a lot of questions.

We'll now turn to Mr. Gregory Matte, Brigadier-General.

You have quite an impressive background, and we're looking forward to hearing from you on a slightly different topic and area.

Go ahead.

[BGen, Retired) Gregory Matte (Executive Director, Helmets to Hardhats]

Mr. Chair and committee members, thank you, first of all for your interest in the Helmets to Hardhats Canada program and for your public and financial support—public in the sense that it was the Prime Minister of Canada who actually launched this program 13 months ago in Edmonton, Alberta, with the financial support of a grant of $150,000 through Veterans Affairs Canada.

I thought I'd take the time I have to give a little bit more context, to and explanation of, the program. Hopefully, that will assist you with the questions you may have thereafter.

This program is modelled after the program of the same name in the United States. It has been active for 10 years now. We've simply replicated a lot of their successes here in the constituency of Canada.

It took a number of years to get the program set up in Canada. The reason for that was the governance that we wanted to put in place. This is a not-for-profit organization. It's incorporated under the Canada Corporations Act with a board of governors and bylaws, and we have it set up in such a way that the people who are the stakeholders do not have a majority over the program itself; it's a group of people coming together, including governments at all levels—provincially and federally—and people from the private sector, as well as unions and associations, such that nobody has dominion.

The niche of this program is the fact that we're offering an opportunity for a great career in the building and construction industry to men and women who have served or are currently serving in the Canadian Forces, and it's not just the career opportunity: it's the fact that we offer them the opportunity to become trained, skilled, and licensed within the trades as well. The bottom line for us is that it's not about finding our vets a job; it's about finding our vets a career. We're going to help any one of those who have helped our country, including those who have been injured in the line of duty.

Canadian veterans face three challenges, really, when they leave the Canadian Forces and try to enter into a career in the civilian world.

The first one—and I might be an example of this—is that many people join the military when they are quite young. As a result, when it comes time for them to leave the military, they really do not have the experience of writing a resumé, nor have they actually gone through a difficult job interview. When they joined the military, it was a very receiving audience.

Second, it's very difficult for someone in the military to translate their skills and qualifications into civilian terms that an employer would recognize.

Third, and perhaps most important, is the fact that given the nature of the military culture and the brotherhood of war, it's actually quite difficult for men and women who have served their country in uniform to find a cultural organizational fit that works with them and for them.

The value proposition that I'm putting forward to industry on behalf of all veterans of Canada is as follows: you're talking about a cadre of individuals who are highly dependable, loyal, and flexible. How many people at one moment could be reconstructing a country like Haiti after an earthquake, the next month going off to the Khyber Pass of Afghanistan and dealing with the Taliban to bring freedom and security so that girls can go to school, and then, the following summer, go to deal with the flooding in Manitoba? For all their good work, we then bring them here to Ottawa to serve on staff.

These men and women have the ability to learn. They have the ability to learn because the Canadian Forces is a learning environment. They learn how to learn within a classroom environment and to do distance learning on their own, using computers and using simulators. More importantly, not only do they learn how to learn, but they learn how to teach. Most of the teaching we provide in the Canadian Forces is done by people in uniform. What better way to learn than to teach, and what better way to master it than to share that with others?

I think you would all agree with me that people in the military are team players. This is a valuable quality when you look at what we do here in Canada, particularly in the construction industry. Not only are these people good followers, but they're also great leaders. Furthermore, they're used to dealing in dynamic situations and to multi-tasking. They have all the qualities of leadership within the civilian context.

The Conservative government, I will say, has blessed the Canadian Forces with the reinvigoration of our capitalization of the military, but most people who have spent a number of years in the military have learned to become very resourceful, because we have to look after our equipment and make sure that it operates when we need it most.

Furthermore, despite the business we're in, we're actually very safety conscious, which obviously is important in the construction industry.

Finally, the men and women who have served their country are proven. They have a background that's well documented by their performance reports. They have background security checks, which are very important in certain sectors of the industry, and obviously they have met medical and physical standards.

The program itself is all about matching that talent to the need in the Canadian construction industry. We are a team of four, all former military, and bilingual. We have a very simple system that provides a website where veterans who are interested in being part of this program register along with companies, contractors, and unions that subscribe to the notions of this program. In that way, we now have a matchmaking opportunity. That said, given the transition challenges that military people face, we provide counselling to those individuals to help them with that difficult transition.

We have some challenges in the program, one of which is just getting visibility. Being here today is very helpful for the program.

We ensure priority placements so that veterans come first in line when it comes to apprenticeships within the unions. We deal with every person case by case, because when you're dealing with mental illness or physical disability, you have to understand the context of their circumstances and the few limitations they may have to make sure there's a good fit.

Mr. Chair, that concludes my opening remarks.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you very much for that informative presentation. We will open up to questions.

We'll start with Mr. Cleary.

[Ryan Cleary, NDP, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My questions are for the brigadier-general and are about the Helmets to Hardhats program.

First, I'm looking for the number of veterans who have actually gone through Helmets to Hardhats so far, and their average age. Can you give us some details there?

[BGen (Retired) Gregory Matte]

We can give you preliminary details. The website has been in place only since September 18. With the website we're now able to collect the statistics that you're referring to. As of today, probably upwards of 680 veterans have registered through the website.

The average age is all over the demographics. We have people who have retired from the military after their initial three-year contract, and those could be as young as 20 or 21 years old. We see an awful lot of people who are in their late 20s or early 30s, in part because of the situation with the military at the moment and in part because we have a number of people who are approaching a point in their lives at which it is time to make a transition.

What I mean by that, for instance, is that in the military people are eligible for a pension after 20 years of service. That has been changed in the last 10 years. That said, it's an important decision point for someone who has achieved 20 years of service. They now have guaranteed revenue that will allow them to facilitate a transition into a new career.

Then we have other folks who are at the end of their careers. They could be in their late 40s or early 50s. In fact, I was just talking to one fellow yesterday who's been retired for a number of years. He's in his late 50s. I won't give you his name, but he is on an apprenticeship out in Edmonton, having moved there from the province of Prince Edward Island.

[Ryan Cleary, NDP, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Brigadier-General, you mentioned veterans with mental illness and physical disability. Of the 680 veterans who have registered on the website, how many would have mental illness? I would assume that this would be as a result of their trauma from whatever situations they've served in. How many of these veterans would have mental illness or physical disability?

[BGen (Retired) Gregory Matte]

I wouldn't have a quantifiable number, because I don't want to track that data in case our website is hacked. We know what happened with Veterans Affairs Canada a year and a half ago. I don't want that to happen with the website we have. We've taken extraordinary measures for security reasons.

That said, we limit the amount of information we collect. Every case has its own circumstances. If someone self-identifies to me as having a mental illness, I then explore that with them without going into great detail, because I'm not a medical doctor. I just want to know what triggers those problems, how they are managing them right now, and where they would be comfortable working.

I can give an analogy. We had an individual who was hired as a boilermaker. He had worked on the M777 howitzer over in one of the forward operating bases in Afghanistan. He had shell shock.

Boilers make a lot of noise. The tools that they work with are very heavy. He wanted to do that, but he was transparent with the union that he joined and with the people who were on his course about having that mental challenge. The first day there was a loud noise in the classroom, and of course he froze, but the people around him, first of all, respected his service, and second of all were aware of his limited challenge—and it's only a limited one—and they were highly empathetic. They helped him through that brief moment, and since then he's done very well. He's continued with his apprenticeship with great success.

All that is to say that we deal with every individual's circumstances on a case-by-case basis within their own unique construct.

[Ryan Cleary, NDP, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Brigadier General, you mentioned a particular challenge with visibility and how this program has been ongoing in the States for about a decade, although not so long here, obviously.

In what ways can you address the visibility aspect to make this program better known across the country?

[BGen (Retired) Gregory Matte]

That's a very thoughtful question. I thank you for asking it.

I really have four key audiences that I'm dealing with in the first year, and we're only about eight months into the first year since I've been part of the program.

The first audience, obviously, is the military community itself, but they're broken up into three groups: the regular force component, meaning those who are full-time; the reserves and all the different militia units across Canada from coast to coast to coast; and then the retired veterans.

The second community are the unions that are part of this program, the international unions, the AFL-CIO, and going to the local level and the union lodge level and dealing with the business manager—basically the guy or the woman in charge of that union—to make sure they fully understand the value proposition and are fully on board to make sure that these vets get priority placement.

The third group are the contractors and employers across Canada in the building and construction industry. We make them aware of this fantastic opportunity. Obviously there's workforce development embedded in what we're doing, but they get it.

Then finally it's dealing with the colleges and the provinces that are part of the apprenticeship approval process all across this great country. In that case, I am dealing with 13 constituencies.

Those are the four audiences that I'm trying to get visibility with.

[Ryan Cleary, NDP, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

You work with—

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you, Mr. Cleary. Your time is up.

We'll move to Mr. Daniel.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, witnesses, for being here.

I'm going to switch to the colleges to begin with. There were two themes that came out in both introductory notes, and that was how you break into changing the mindset of people to actually get people to go into apprenticeships. I'm going to ask you a personal question: have you talked to your children about going into one of the trades?

[Dr. Kent MacDonald]

I have. I have four children and I've spoken to the youngest one.

I was a teacher here in Ottawa, out in Orleans, at St. Matthew High School, and in that role never once did I have a conversation with students about what they wanted to do. In my mind, having gone through a university system, my conversation was more self-reflective of “That's a university student and that's a college student.” That's the type of conversation that has to shift.

Certainly, my wife—who's also an educator—and I have been able to do that, but it's deep-rooted, and there are biases in terms of how we portray these opportunities in the media with the words that we use to describe the work and the mimicking that we use for some of the professions. I think, because of the deep-rootedness, that it will take some time to change.

[David Corson]

I'll just say that my grandmother was a master weaver and I was a textile chemist. I got to dye the work my grandmother made, so I'm a little biased to the trades.

My daughter is in pre-health. She's decided that she wants to be a doctor, and her reason is that she has a neurological disease is committed that she's going to find the cure for it. I've never dissuaded her from that, but I always did make sure that she knew that she could have any trade she wanted. However, I am biased.

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

How do we actually tackle this issue of educating parents in terms of what can be done with apprenticeship programs?

[David Corson]

When I was doing the research, I was shocked at how well the trades are paid. As well, there is a demand for them, as I heard from a newspaper article that someone had clipped today. I think that this is the sort of thing that will do it. You let people know what is available.

I'm going into Internet security at the moment. I'm being retrained, because my industries are gone. There's no sense being a dyer any more; there are no textiles to dye in Canada, so let's move on. Will there be a need for Internet security in 20 years? Probably. Will there be a need for IT? Maybe not the same. However, there will be a need for skilled trades. I don't think we're preparing people, but that is in fact something you can go into and have a 20-year, 25-year, or 30-year career in.

[Dr. Kent MacDonald]

Dr. King from Queen's University led a double-cohort study in Ontario that produced four different reports. His work showed that colleges like Algonquin were always focused on recruiting students in grades 10, 11, and 12. What became clear from Dr. King's studies was that these students are making these decisions significantly earlier than we ever thought.

Once a grade 10 student said he or she was going to Queen's, if you asked them in grade 11 where they were going, they would say they were going to Queen's. In grade 12 they would say that they told us last year they were going to Queen's. It was only when Queen's said that they were not coming to Queen's that they had to recalibrate where they wanted to go.

The efforts of some colleges are aimed at younger students, but the question is who influences young people. Dr. King's reports also clearly showed it was the parents. Media are there, guidance counsellors are fifth or sixth on the list, and teachers are there, but it's fundamentally the parents.

From our perspective we've even started to get into elementary schools, trying to have people think of these careers in a different way.

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

Here is a question to all of you: what do we do to improve the yields of apprenticeships? In other words, we're finding or hearing from various witnesses that there's a large dropout in the apprenticeship program. I'm not sure what it is in Helmets to Hardhats. Can you comment on any of those?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

We'll conclude with those responses.