Human Resources Committee on Feb. 12th, 2013

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Kayla, we'll start with you. I think you want to make a comment, and then we'll work our way through.

[Kayla O'Brien]

In most apprenticeships you have to have a job before you become an apprentice or go to school.

I am fortunate in that I work in a family business, so my job is typically secure, or I can hope.

I know that if you're a union member, at least within my trade, your job is pretty well secure while you're in school. The Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities mandates that the job is secure while you are in school, and you're not to lose that position.

It may be difficult to start out initially, but once you are an apprentice it shouldn't be that hard. You can jump from company to company.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

You're all now apprentices, but was it difficult to get that spot?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Does anyone else wish to comment?

[Éric Duquette]

It was difficult for me due to the ratio of 3:1. It's hard to find employers who can carry a certain number of plumbers as apprentices, so that's one challenge that I did find, for sure.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Nathan, do you have a comment?

[Nathan Banke]

There are a couple of different challenges there. In a way it's the chicken-and-egg paradox. First, if you're doing a regular apprenticeship program you have to get the job first, but how do you get the job if you're not an apprentice? In certain trades that's going to be easier than in others, but for the most part you have to start off as a bit of a go-getter to get the job first, and then sign up as an apprentice with the ministry, and then continue on.

In a lot of trades there are alternative programs through which you can take a pre-apprenticeship course at a college or even sometimes a high school to give you the base-level skills to get your foot in the door to get that basic job. Otherwise, how are you supposed to sign up for an apprenticeship if you can't get a job and you can't sign up as an apprentice if you don't have a job? There is that.

Also, as you just said, there are ratios, and depending—I'm not sure of the numbers, but it depends on the trade—there are different ratios. If you're at a garage with mechanics and you can only have one apprentice per technician, that gets pretty expensive if you have to have a licensed technician for every apprentice. That's something the employers always have to consider.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

The other thing we've heard over and over again is that EI is not easy, and that delays in processing and difficulties with EI make the connections between the periods of school and the periods on the job much more difficult. Has that been your experience as well?

[Kayla O'Brien]

I haven't worked since December 21. I am currently fighting to get my EI. I have no money.

I've heard that if you're related to your employer, they will give you a bit more grief. “Grief” is probably the wrong word, but it seems the CRA needs to look into it to make sure I'm not getting a back-handed apprenticeship. They were questioning me as to whether I was really working the full hours.

Regardless, no one else in my program.... There are currently almost 40 of us in advanced sheet metal right now at Algonquin; everyone is getting paid yesterday, and we're in our sixth week. We have guys who had to take out loans or beg loans from their parents to try to pay their bills. It can be kind of painful.

[Steven Church]

Yes, I agree.

For me, this year is a perfect example. In my previous two years, at my first level it took about one month for me to receive EI benefits. Last year it was surprisingly quick. I was receiving benefits by about my third week in school. This year I still haven't received any benefits.

I got off the phone with EI this morning, actually, because I got a message saying they hadn't received my record of employment, even though I hand-delivered it on January 18.

I've heard other horror stories from other apprentices who told me they never received EI benefits at all during their level 2.

From the time you leave your employer to the time you start school, there is a huge gap or a huge waiting period until you receive your benefits. People have bills to pay. We're not allowed to work part time to supplement that, because we're supposed to be collecting EI benefits. If we're not collecting EI benefits or not receiving them, we have no money, so it's definitely a challenge.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Is there anyone else? No? All right.

Mr. Sullivan, your time is up, so we'll move to Mr. Butt.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Thank you very much, all of you, for being here. Congratulations for what you're doing. My daughters are 13 and 9, so I haven't had the conversation with them yet, but I certainly will be.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

That was the one about the birds and the bees.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

I haven't had that one either, Rodger. I'm leaving that up to the wife. I'm not handling that one.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

One of the things that I find interesting about the whole apprenticeship thing is there seems to be what I would call two different types. We have people who are coming right out of high school and are getting into these programs, and then we also have what I would call second-career-type apprenticeships. In this type people who may have worked in a different field or who've been in an industry that is downsizing, because that's the way the market is going, are retraining through the apprenticeship program for a job that may be totally unrelated to what they were doing before.

Are any of you in that particular situation? You're all fairly young, so was this a career choice that you made right out of secondary school, or were you doing something else and then something drove you to decide that it wasn't going to work out or that you'd rather do something different, and now you've decided to enrol and participate in an apprenticeship program?

[Steven Church]

I might have mentioned briefly that I was actually a Canadian Forces soldier beforehand. I'm still a serving reservist member, but I'm 30 years old right now and still apprenticing, trying to finish it up, so I'm definitely in that category.

I've served in the military for about nine years. I left because being a mechanic was something that I always wanted to do throughout high school, but so was the military. I left the military because it was a bit of a wake-up call overseas that it was time to do something so that I could actually raise a family, so I made that sacrifice to change careers.

[Nathan Banke]

I was straight out of high school. I started my apprenticeship program at Algonquin College in level 1. I was 16 years old, still technically a high school student, and that was through a youth apprenticeship program. There are those youth apprenticeship programs across Canada, various iterations of them, depending on the province. I'm kind of the polar opposite. At 16 years old I started my apprenticeship and followed through with that; by the time I was 20, I had my licence and was out working in the field.

Now I'm no longer working as a mechanic. I haven't been for the last couple of years, but all the training and all the experience—I'm still working in the same field, in the same domain—and everything that I do now in my job relates to the apprenticeship and relates to schools, and everything with that.

I don't know if you have more questions on the experience.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Maybe I'll just ask you, then, Nathan, because we're hearing this disconnect about the advice by teachers, by guidance counsellors, by others in high school that these opportunities are not being promoted very well to people who are in grade 10, 11, 12 as an option for them to look at.

How did you get hooked on going the apprenticeship route, rather than going where I think most parents tend to tell their kids, which is to university to get a B.A. in something, because that's what everybody does and you have to do it. Who pushed you, or who helped you? How did you find out about apprenticeship as an option for you, rather than going the route that we constantly hear most others are tending to do, which is “You have to go to university, you have to go to university”?

[Nathan Banke]

Before explaining my circumstances for that, I just want to say that in my job right now, a lot of times I've given presentations to college teachers. Next month I'm going to be presenting to about 50 college teachers. I'm talking to hundreds of college teachers throughout the course of the year, and everywhere I go, no matter where it is—Canada, the United States, any province, any city, any town—all the teachers I talk to are saying that the students they are getting lack the basic skills. If you go back five, 10, 15 years with these kids who are coming in, the guidance counsellors are pushing them in for typically the wrong reasons, but they're also lacking basic skills because our base-level culture has changed.

They don't have the father, the uncle, the aunt, the grandfather in the family, someone doing a manual trade, a skilled trade. Who cares what it is? If you've got uncle Tony working on a chimney duct or something, and you're there holding the hammer or holding something working with him, you get the base-level touch and feel of holding a screwdriver, a hammer, or whatever. A lot of these kids now are completely lacking that experience.

You can look at what is happening in the high schools. When they're taking away the high school shop programs or trades programs, you've got nothing. They don't know how to hold a screwdriver or a hammer. They don't know what a wrench is, and now the guidance counsellors are pushing the kids who aren't academic into a program and essentially babysitting them and trying to give them the base-level skills just to be able to function with tactile things with their hands. That's what I'm seeing across the country, in provinces all over the place and across the United States.

To get back to your first question, I was like Steve. When I was in high school, I asked myself if I wanted to go to university. Yes. Did I have any money? No. University was going cost a lot of money that I didn't have. Did I want to go to the military? Yes, but at 16 years of age I didn't want to make a commitment to do something like the Royal Military College in Kingston or join the services and make a long-term commitment. You cant make a decision like that at 16 years of age, or at least I couldn't.

For me it was to do some calculations, some basic math. If I went to university, I was going to end up four years later with a whole bunch of debt, even if I worked my ass off, or I could go into the apprenticeship system. At the time I could get into the Ontario youth apprenticeship system, which let you leave high school early, get a job, make money while working that job, and have those hours—say, 30 hours a week at a shop or whatever. You're making money, you're getting high school co-op credits, and you're getting apprenticeship hours. The government was paying for the level 1 apprenticeship. All of a sudden, financially it just made sense to do an apprenticeship.

At that time, there weren't the incentives they're giving out in Ontario right now. When my brother did his apprenticeship, he got the $1,000 at each level, and then the $2,000 at the end or whatever. I never had that, but the incentives are there. Going to school only costs $400-$500 for your level, compared to the thousands and thousands of dollars your friends are paying. In the meantime you're working and making money.

It's a financial incentive. That's what got me in there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you for that, Nathan.

Kayla, did you have comment you wanted to make?

[Kayla O'Brien]

I'm on a middle ground. I wasn't fully trained for a another trade or for anything. I went to the University of Ottawa for two years, and I hated every minute I was there, so I went another route and shopped around, working wherever it was. I recently discovered that my dad giving me the job offer was an attempt to scare me back into university, but I tried it and I liked it. It backfired. It was six of one, half dozen of the other.

I have to agree that there's a big problem with the secondary education system and the stigma that lies between colleges and universities. For example, when I said to my boyfriend's cousin, “Oh, you got into college”, his mother just jumped all over me saying, “No, he got into university.”

It's a post-secondary program. I graduated from high school in 2005, and the stigma I understand is still there to this day, eight years later: smart kids go to university, stupid kids go to college. If I were to show any of you the math that I have to do, or the science.... I could teach you the physics of air. I know that. I can design a duct system. Stupid people can't do that.

There's a lot in every trade that everybody needs to do. There are people who need a lot of help math-wise, science-wise, English-wise, or with everything. We learn differently or we excel in different fields, but these stigmas override that. It really does need to be addressed, because it is a wonderful opportunity, a wonderful trade. Everyone I know who's in it isn't regretting that they're in it. They're in it because they love it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

That's a good point. Thank you for that comment.

We'll move to Mr. Rousseau.

[Jean Rousseau, NDP, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Thank you very much.

Ms. O'Brien, my father was a sheet metal worker too, and look where I am now. Everything is possible.

[Kayla O'Brien]

There you go.