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.