Thank you very much for inviting me here to appear before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities.
This is my first appearance before a government committee, so guys, go easy on me.
My name is David Acco. I'm the president of Acosys Consulting. I'm a Cree-Métis descended from Cumberland House, Saskatchewan, and a member of the Métis Nation of Saskatchewan.
I'm joined today by Jerry Peltier, former grand chief of the Mohawk community of Kanesatake and currently our VP of government and indigenous relations. Mr. Peltier is responsible for partnerships with the federal government as well as with the national aboriginal organizations, the NAOs. He also supports Acosys corporate customers with respect to aboriginal relations and policy development.
Acosys is a 100% owned and controlled aboriginal company. We're a for-profit company. Acosys primarily provides professional consulting in information technology, human resources, and aboriginal policy development.
Acosys has a strong social entrepreneurial mission of inclusion of aboriginal people in the workforce at the professional level. Hence, we've been working very closely with government and industry to overcome the barriers to aboriginal people's participation and to enhance the socio-economic outcomes of our people and enable aboriginal persons to contribute and share more fully in all aspects of Canada's growth and prosperity.
On Thursday, December 5, 2013, representatives of Employment and Social Development Canada, or ESDC, and Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, or AANDC, appeared before you to share their insights into this important topic. Recently representatives from the aboriginal organizations and groups appeared before you to share their concerns and recommendations with respect to aboriginal persons in the workforce and the funding support available to them through the federal government, including the aboriginal skills and employment training strategy, the ASETS.
They all provided you with their statistics on the aboriginal workforce and the education numbers for first nations and aboriginal people. I will not repeat those statistics or the aboriginal labour market and education information. I think you've already received all that information—which I agree with, by the way.
On November 7, 2013, during the second session of the 41st Parliament, the committee adopted a motion to study the opportunities for aboriginal persons in the workforce and supports available to them through the federal government, including the aboriginal skills and employment training strategy, which is up for renewal in 2015.
This committee has asked me to share my knowledge and experience with respect to the issues of education and employment of aboriginal people, which flows directly from our private sector experience. In our eight years of fulfilling our entrepreneurial and social mission, we have noticed the following recurrent challenges: a shortage of professional aboriginal resources for industry; a mismatch between industry's expectations for aboriginal resources and available resources; an increasing number of aboriginal professionals seeking employment from the public sector due to government cutbacks; the lack of recognition of skills and experience by the private sector from the public sector employees; systemic racism prevalent in Canadian society, which continues to affect aboriginal peoples in terms of openly self-identifying; difficulty securing employment for aboriginal job seekers; and a lack of recognition of the urban aboriginal population.
We believe these challenges are insufficiently recognized in the current available analyses of the urban aboriginal employment gap. Understanding them will help the standing committee to understand the private sector's employment gap in greater depth and address it more comprehensively through policy. At present there are many employment training programs for aboriginal people who are subsidized by different layers of government and other organizations. These programs are short-term interventions that target entry-level and skilled labour employment with limited mobility.
With regard to the recent report entitled “Labour and Skills Shortages in Canada: Addressing Current and Future Challenges”, the Honourable Diane Finley, former minister of HRSDC, in her response to this report discussing strategies for reducing the unemployment rate of aboriginal people said, and I quote:
Aboriginal peoples’ labour market outcomes must be improved without delay to ensure that a whole generation of Aboriginal youth do not miss out on the opportunities resulting from a lack of skilled workers on major projects operating near Aboriginal communities.
As the Honourable Diane Finley remarks, the way to close this gap lies in helping aboriginal people to their full potential, and she notes that “improving the education and skills of Aboriginal people will be key to ensuring that they can reach their full potential in the labour force”.
In response to the challenges that we have ourselves observed that were presented in the report, “Labour and Skills Shortages in Canada: Addressing Current and Future Challenges”, and with regard to the response from the Honourable Diane Finley to this report, we developed an aboriginal internship program, which henceforth I'll refer to as the AIP.
To date, the AIP has generated 15 success stories. We believe that this successful program, which has moved beyond the conceptual phase, merits further investment by the Canadian government. The AIP has already been proven successful in helping aboriginal people find professional employment and management-level careers within top-tier private sector employers. This is a win-win result for our people and for the businesses they now work for. This is also a positive outcome because the program is helping build a stronger and more professional workforce now and for the future.
The AIP is an aboriginal-led vehicle for building aboriginal participation in the private sector at the professional and management levels, for growing role models and business networks, and for creating measurable results for the Government of Canada's investment. However, when we first started this program, there was no financial support from the NAOs or from the Government of Canada. Acosys funded this program from its own profits.
For the past two years, the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples has funded the AIP from the ASETS program. However, CAP recently decided not to continue funding the program for the upcoming fiscal year 2014-15. We can get into that a little bit later on, I guess, maybe during questioning.
AIP takes a comprehensive approach through recruiting aboriginal people and interns by working with businesses, mentoring, and job-shadowing with our senior consultants, and by their certification through the university programs, while working on live project delivery on our client sites, which provides the businesses the opportunity to observe the aboriginal interns as valued members of a project team.
Our program is highly effective in matching talented aboriginal youth with private sector needs and supporting each participant's professional development through a 52-week program life cycle. When leveraging entry-level positions such as customer call centres within private industry, our focus has been on career paths, with the ultimate goal of building aboriginal talent for industry.
In these two examples, our AIP approach focuses on integration and long-term retention. We understand that the current program's measure of success is either six months of continuous employment or a return to school. Industry's measure of success is three years of continuous employment.
The AIP's success rate has been continuous employment over three years after hire, in most cases with the same employer, and our interns have continued their education through evening courses at the university level—in other words, increasing their marketability. In other cases, our interns have found employment on their own merits with other firms in the private sector, which has led to higher incomes and greater management responsibility. They attribute their professional success to the AIP for opening doors and giving them their first management experience to prepare them to be successful in their chosen fields—in this case, HR and IT.
We understand that this is an unprecedented success. Our first interns who went through our AIP are now engaged and are being promoted into positions of influence in top-tier management levels in private industry. This in turn builds management's better understanding of aboriginal people and a better network for newly graduated aboriginals looking for their first employment within the private sector.
As noted in the government's response to the recent report, “Meeting the skills challenges of the future will require not only concerted action, but also innovative thinking, approaches, and partnerships.” The AIP is a leading example of an innovative partnership.
Mr. Chairman, with the support of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, we propose to expand our AIP into a national pilot program of three years' duration, supporting 10 participants per year, with the aim of helping aboriginal youth develop the skills that today's employers need. We are confident that an expanded program can help advance the goals of the Government of Canada and the aboriginal peoples in building a skilled, flexible workforce.
In conclusion, I'd like to add that we have letters of support from the aboriginal organizations and from private sector for this innovative program.
I'm tabling four additional copies of our presentation about our company and who we are and the aboriginal internship program for your consideration. We're prepared to meet with your committee members in order to elaborate on our AIP and discuss other possible options of addressing the education and employment challenges of aboriginal people and what aboriginal people face.
Mr. Chairman, I thank you for listening and I'm prepared to answer any questions.
Thank you very much.