I'm pleased to be here to speak on the subject of Bill C-31, the budget implementation act. I'm pleased to be joined, thanks to the fact that we have our conference here in Ottawa this week, by the chair of our board, Mr. James Loder. We will talk about apprenticeship more specifically.
A number of positive measures were taken by the government which, in our view, will mean that more Canadians will access much needed support to gain meaningful employment through this budget. Rather than going through each of them, I would like to spend a bit of time to highlight some of the measures we believe will have a real and direct impact on people.
The Canada apprenticeship loan is a measure that will provide apprentices much needed support to help them complete their training. When I was here on Tuesday last week, I mentioned the fact that we needed to provide the tools needed for people to complete their training. This is certainly one of them, and we thank the government for doing this. We see this as an important measure that could help increase the number of apprentices and help some of them to complete the apprenticeships.
The measures announced last week by the Prime Minister to support youth employment in high demand fields by paying for real-life experience will also enable young people to get their foot in the door and finally be able to answer the question: do you have any experience? Well, yes, this program will allow them to have the experience that they need.
We also applaud, and really do applaud, the measures designed to strengthen on-reserve education. Our members have had several successes with those types of projects and we think they should be expanded. When one visits the education and training for aboriginal people section of the program, however, they notice a number of programs designed to help first nations and Inuit students to enter university, legal programs, etc., all designed to take them away from the reservations for a long period of time. Completion rates are low. Programs delivered on reserve have a much higher success rate.
The example I quoted on Tuesday, which, by the way, was in the example from the school led by the chair of our board, showed the difference between an on-reserve and off-reserve program. Off-reserve completion rates were 7%; on-reserve rates were 76%—a big difference, a very big difference. We would hope that the government would consider, even if only as a pilot project, to support career colleges' efforts to develop on-reserve training programs, as several projects across the country exist, but await some support.
One measure that we struggle to understand why it is not included in the budget is the provision of grants to students enrolled in programs of less than 60 weeks. With the risk of sounding like a broken record—and I will sound like a broken record—it is hard to understand why we would penalize students who want to obtain meaningful employment faster just because their programs are less than 60 weeks. The government is looking at getting people back to work faster, and it is looking at helping employers fill vacant jobs, all of this to improve our economy. We're doing our part, but we can certainly do more with a government that's willing to partner with us. This government has done quite a bit, and we're willing to continue working with it.
The chair will continue.