Evidence of meeting #83 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was workers.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
So 75% is still the lowest it has been in six years. Are we able to connect the dots here and say the people we took out of the processing centres are having a negative impact on the performance?
Senior Associate Deputy Minister, Chief Operating Officer for Service Canada, Department of Human Resources and Skills Development
I think what we're seeing here is the tail end of the effect of the recession on the labour market, so the claim load, the number of people making claims for employment insurance, remains elevated.
In terms of whether there is a result here of reducing staff, I would say that if we look at productivity measures, that is not a key reason why we're not meeting the speed-of-pay indicator. We are constantly, year after year, driving down the actual per-claim costs and we're increasing the number of claims that are being automated. We're now at 65% of all claims partially or fully automated.
Liberal
Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
You're driving down the performance, obviously, if it's at 75%, the lowest in six years. You're driving down the performance when the standard is 80% and you're hitting 75%.
How much time have I left here?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ed Komarnicki
You have 15 seconds.
Do you want to make a comment? It's a good place to stop.
Liberal
Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
I'd like to thank the officials for coming. Honest to God, it would be great to have you for a longer period of time and get down to some real issues here, but I want to thank you for coming.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ed Komarnicki
Thank you very much for coming, for being prepared to answer questions, and for sharing with us.
I will ask you now to leave, as we have a few matters to attend to with respect to the estimates. We appreciate your attendance, for sure.
HUMAN RESOURCES AND SKILLS DEVELOPMENT
Department
Vote 1—Operating expenditures..........$626,536,688
Vote 5—The grants listed in the Estimates and contributions..........$1,761,893,292
Canada Industrial Relations Board
Vote 10—Program expenditures..........$11,916,532
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation
Vote 15—To reimburse Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation for the amounts of loans forgiven, grants, contributions and expenditures made, and losses, costs and expenses incurred..........$2,100,578,000
Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety
Vote 20—Program expenditures..........$3,853,172
(Votes 1, 5, 10, 15, and 20 agreed to)
Shall I report the main estimates to the House?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ed Komarnicki
All right, I will report them to the House.
Thank you, officials.
We have some committee business that I wish to deal with before we do the second panel.
Yes.
Conservative
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ed Komarnicki
All right. Could you do that?
(Motion agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])
We will move in camera.
[Proceedings continue in camera]
[Public proceedings resume]
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ed Komarnicki
We'll call the meeting back to order.
We apologize for the fact that we're running late. We thank you very much for accommodating us while we finished some committee business.
We will hear today from the Canadian Association of Retired Persons and also from the Fédération des aînées et aînés francophones du Canada.
You'll present for about five to seven minutes, and then there will be questions from each of the parties.
We'll start with Ms. Susan Eng.
Susan Eng Vice-President, Advocacy, Canadian Association of Retired Persons
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for bringing a focus to the strategies to retain and recruit older workers, and thank you for the opportunity to present on the study.
CARP is a national non-profit, non-partisan organization, with about 300,000 members across the country and 56 chapters. We advocate for changes in public policy that will improve our quality of life as all Canadians age.
The issue of older workers actually straddles our main advocacy pillars: our financial security, our rights, and to a large extent our health.
Canadians are continuing to work because they want to and because they need to. Older workers represent an increasing proportion of the workforce, partly because of the size of the boomer generation and partly because that group is staying in the workforce longer.
Despite the gains in workplace equity and the more common presence of older workers in the workplace, they still face barriers in keeping the jobs they have, in getting new ones, or returning to the workforce after leaving it to care for loved ones or to recover from the devastation of their savings in the recent market crash.
To address some of these concerns and barriers, CARP recommends that the federal government work with the provinces to develop, fund, and support phased retirement benefits and flexible work schedules; extension of workplace health and dental coverage; job match, skills training, and transition support programs; caregiver support, caregiver leave, and long-term care insurance coverage; and innovative management strategies to create, say, an emeritus role for older workers, intergenerational sensitivity, and zero tolerance for workplace age discrimination.
First, of course, we should decide who we mean when we say “an older worker”.
If we mean those Canadians who are over 55 years of age, we're talking about 3.5 million Canadians who are in the workforce today, or nearly 20% of the Canadian workforce.
If we include all those over 45—in some industries, that's an older worker—we're talking about nearly 8 million Canadians, or about 44% of the Canadian workforce. This is a huge group of people who can be affected by the ideas that come out of this committee.
The surprising group is those over 65, those we don't normally think of as a priority target for recruitment or retention in the workforce. Over 600,000 seniors are in the Canadian workforce today, double the number in 2006, when there were just over 300,000 seniors in the workforce.
This reflects some positive trends. Canadians are living longer, healthier lives, and with the end of mandatory retirement are continuing to contribute to the economy.
The rate of increase is also instructive. In addition to the almost doubling of the number of seniors in the workforce since 2006, those aged 60 to 64 increased their participation by 46%. This increase in participation is happening at a time in their lives when we would be expecting them to be winding down.
The largest part of the increase took place in 2008, when the economy took a nosedive and retirement savings were devastated.
This leads to the other main reason that Canadians are still working: they need to.
In fact, when we polled our members this past weekend in preparation for this presentation, we found that among those still working, the reasons were almost equally divided between wanting to and needing to.
A number of surveys have focused on people who tell us that they're deferring their retirement. In our poll, we found that those who had already retired did so by the time they were age 60. Among those who have not yet retired, they do not expect to do so until age 71. That's just within the sample of our members.
Your challenge to us—to identify the strategies for employers to recruit and retain older workers—is certainly a very positive characterization of the issue. In fact, we first have to establish that there is a trend among employers wanting to recruit and retain older workers. Certainly this committee's work might spark that trend, but it's not the reality on the ground.
Surveys conducted by StatsCan and private polling firms have reflected the sense by older workers that they are undervalued, discriminated against due to their age, and pessimistic about their job prospects. Indeed, when we polled in December 2011, fully one-quarter of them said they had either themselves suffered age discrimination in the workplace or knew somebody who had. Almost half thought this was a very common situation in the workplace.
Nonetheless, our members tend to prefer to focus on strategies and solutions, as evidenced by their support of the government's elimination of mandatory retirement, which took effect in December 2012. That was something that CARP had pursued vigorously over the years. That removed legislated age discrimination, along with the previous changes in provincial legislation, but that didn't necessarily eliminate workplace age discrimination generally.
Just to reinforce that there's a real need today to still deal with that issue, the Ontario government quietly passed legislation in 2011 to restore mandatory retirement for firefighters, based on the same regressive arguments, I might add, that I had to listen to when we came before this committee and others to ask for the elimination of mandatory retirement in federally regulated industries. It should come as no surprise that people said they did not get the same opportunities for advancement, they were more likely to be laid off, and they were given undesirable work assignments, all on account of their age. It explains their strong support for a workplace that ensures equal opportunity and equal pay regardless of age.
Employers can be asked to demonstrate that they indeed value older workers in the workplace by addressing the actual needs of older workers, extending health and dental coverage beyond the usual age 65 limitation, phasing in retirement or flexible work schedules to accommodate their need to wind down and to care for a loved one, creating proactive programs to actively recruit older workers, and/or involving them in specific projects to have a specific goal in the organization.
Not much weight was given in our polling for long service recognition awards and programs. These people are confronted with hard choices in their lives and need real work, fair treatment, and remuneration and benefits they can actually use.
These strategies would certainly help employers to retain older workers, primarily by demonstrating that they actually want them to stay.
Strategies are also needed to help older workers find jobs. Older workers have told pollsters they believe they are not getting jobs because of their age, and far-sighted employers, who choose to target older workers in their recruiting, are highly likely to have a very strong response. That's why CARP is very supportive of the Third Quarter initiative, which was given $6 million over three years in the 2012 budget to match prospective employers with qualified employees.
Of importance here is that it actually overcomes one of the major barriers that older workers and candidates face; that is, they have found that there are unreceptive employers who see their age as a disadvantage. Looking over the jobs that are available, we see there are more full-time jobs instead of casual and more insecure jobs.
Lastly, I want to focus on the opportunity to innovate in the workplace. I think employers have to anticipate the need for intergenerational sensitivity and tensions. They need to develop clear roles for older employees, such as recruitment, outreach, special projects, or mentoring. Work schedules need to be adjusted so that they can accommodate perhaps part-time employment for busy periods, seasonal changes, a reduced work week, and so on.
In conclusion, older workers want to continue to contribute to the Canadian labour force. Governments, government leadership, and support is needed, along with forward-thinking employers, to ensure that we benefit from that contribution.
Thank you very much.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ed Komarnicki
Thank you, Ms. Eng. I do recall you appearing before this committee when we were dealing with mandatory retirement in federally regulated industries. We certainly appreciate the work you do and the assistance you give this committee.
We'll now move to Jean-Luc Racine for his presentation.
Jean-Luc Racine Director General, Fédération des aînées et aînés francophones du Canada
Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen members of the House, on behalf of the president of the Fédération des aînés et aînées francophones du Canada, Mr. Michel Vézina, who could not be present today, I want to thank you for having invited the federation to appear before the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities.
The Fédération des aînés et ainées francophones du Canada speaks for 400,000 francophone persons of 50 years of age or more who live in minority situations in Canada. We represent 27,000 senior francophone members who pay dues to our network. Our organization's mission is to defend the rights and interests of senior francophones in Canada and to promote their needs so as to allow them to achieve their full potential in their language and culture.
Our federation comprises 11 member federations, present in each of the Canadian provinces. We are very pleased about that. Over the past few years, we have noted that the issue of employment among seniors and retired persons was becoming a matter of increasing concern. Seniors and retirees are telling us in greater and greater numbers that their incomes are insufficient and that they have to continue to work or return to the labour market.
The fact that Canadians are less and less financially prepared to retire, and the fluctuations of financial markets these past years, mean that a large number of people of 50 and over have to continue to work, even beyond the age of 65.
The situation will persist, and worsen over the coming years. That is why it is important to ensure that this phenomenon is dealt with properly, both as concerns seniors and retirees who want to continue to work or return to the labour market, and in terms of employers.
With the aging of the Canadian population and the labour shortages that may well follow, Canada does not have a choice and has to react and be proactive in promoting, recruiting and retaining older workers.
This aspect is all the more important for our minority francophone communities. In a labour market where the absence of qualified bilingual personnel is already perceived as a serious social problem, one can readily see that with the rapid aging of the francophone workforce, the situation is only going to get worse in the next few years, especially given that our minority francophone communities are quite aged. We must thus promote conditions that will encourage older francophone and bilingual workers to remain in or to return to the labour market, and preserve the capacity of the labour market to provide services in both official languages.
A study conducted near the end of the 2000-2010 decade by one of our member federations, the Fédération des aînés et retraités francophones de l'Ontario, showed that the challenges to employment for persons of 50 years or more remain major.
I will begin with obstacles to employment. The study showed that there was a lack of awareness among employers. In total, we interviewed 287 employers in Ontario. Even if 69% of them were favourable to putting in place certain measures to meet the needs of older workers, the vast majority of them had never had the opportunity to think about this topic before the study, and no measures had been put in place in businesses or agencies to meet the needs of older workers.
The study also showed that there was sometimes a lack of flexibility on the part of certain employers. The study clearly demonstrated that certain employers were reluctant to put in place measures to encourage older workers to stay on the job.
It must also be said — and my colleague mentioned this earlier — that there are still a lot of biases against older workers, and this prejudice is persistent. These biases are often related to ideas about absenteeism, the lack of ability to adapt to changing conditions, an inability to withstand pressure and stress, or an inability to adapt to new technologies. However, all of the studies show that older workers have lower rates of absenteeism than younger employees, that they are very loyal to their employer, that they have acquired experience and expertise that allow them to adapt to changing situations, and that growing numbers of retirees are very much up to date on technology. As a case in point, I might mention that when I have problems with my computer, I turn to people of 65 or 70 to help me resolve them.
Seniors and retirees encounter another obstacle, that is to say pension programs that are sometimes poorly adapted to the needs of older workers. The fact that seniors have to reimburse a part of the old age security benefits in no way serves to encourage them to return to work. Because of this many of them are less inclined to return to work or to put in a few more hours, since they have to reimburse a part of their benefits.
However, we would like to point out that changes made in 2012 to the Canada Pension Plan do constitute a considerable incentive for people of 50 years or more who want to continue to work.
As for the needs expressed by older workers, seniors and retirees, the study conducted by one of our member federations showed that those who want to stay on the labour market or return to it want shorter schedules and the possibility of working part-time. They are also very open to sharing positions not only with their peers, that is to say with semi-retired colleagues, but also with younger people in mentorship programs. So they are very open in this regard. In fact, the seniors and retirees who were interviewed were very favourable to the idea of being able to transmit their know-how and expertise to the younger generation.
Another need that was expressed was to be able to choose their schedule. They referred to the possibility of working half-days or in very compressed blocks of time, and of having access to leave without pay and flexible working hours. Many of these people would like to travel. And so they would like to be able to take extended leave, often beyond normal vacation periods. They would also like to be given the opportunity of working at home. Working on contract becomes very interesting for many retirees and older workers.
In terms of support services, senior workers and retirees in our communities told us that they would like to have employment and guidance services that are better adapted to the needs of workers of 50 years or over.
Our experience on the ground shows that it is not always easy for existing employment services to adapt to the needs and realities of persons of 50 years or more. The approach to be used with people of that age is very different from the one that is appropriate for a younger clientele that is just entering the labour market.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ed Komarnicki
Monsieur Racine, if I could get you to bring your presentation to a conclusion, I'd appreciate it.
Director General, Fédération des aînées et aînés francophones du Canada
Concerning the mechanisms that should be put in place, I think that an awareness-raising campaign directed at employers would be very useful. In addition, as my colleague mentioned earlier, we have to encourage employers to be ingenious and innovative with regard to human resources, either through mechanisms that make it clear that the contribution of seniors and retirees is valued, or through workplace support committees. All of these initiatives could foster the recruitment and retention of older workers.
I may have the opportunity of sharing other ideas with you during the questions and comments period.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ed Komarnicki
Merci beaucoup.
We'll proceed with Mr. Cleary for five minutes. We'll have five-minute rounds.
NDP
Ryan Cleary NDP St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And thank you to the witnesses.
My questions are specifically to you, Ms. Eng. Your website speaks about how many people no longer wish to retire and some can't afford to retire. My question at the start is a very general question. Are Canadians working longer because they want to or because they need to? What's the answer there?
Vice-President, Advocacy, Canadian Association of Retired Persons
I'm not entirely sure about Canadians generally. Certainly among our membership they gave us their response. As you might know, we do poll our members every two weeks on our various advocacy issues. On this one, we specifically asked them what was the reason, if they were still working, that they were doing so. The numbers were exactly split between “I like working and it makes me feel good”—all of those positive phrases—and “I need the money, I need the benefits.”
NDP
Ryan Cleary NDP St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL
In terms of increasing the age of eligibility for old age security to 67 from 65....
I'm sorry, do you do polling on a bi-weekly basis, twice a month?
Vice-President, Advocacy, Canadian Association of Retired Persons
Yes, twice a month.
Vice-President, Advocacy, Canadian Association of Retired Persons
Very poorly. First of all, people who themselves, despite the assurances.... Our members tend to be over 50, and most of them would not be specifically affected themselves because of the transition period. Nonetheless, the response rejection of that change was about 80%.
When you drill down a bit to ask them why that is so, given that they themselves would not actually suffer the penalty, they said it was “because it's something we paid for in our taxes”. They see it as part of the social safety net, as part of Canadian values. They talk about it as “my pension”. It wasn't something they accepted as a necessary change. Certainly, they didn't find persuasive the argument that it was necessary to balance the books.
Our current position on that score, by the way, is that they have asked us more than once to say, “Get that decision reversed, and until you get it reversed, make sure that anybody who can't wait those two years is looked after.”
