Human Resources Committee on May 29th, 2014

[Larry Maguire, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Madam Chair, on a point of order—and I hate to interrupt my colleague—

[The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jinny Jogindera Sims), NDP, Jinny Sims]

We'll stop the clock.

[Larry Maguire, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

I wonder, because I thought a pretty important point was being made about communications across the country. Rather than leaving it, I'd give him two minutes of my time if he could read the last page. I think it would be pretty important to have our colleagues agree unanimously to allow him to finish his page.

[The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jinny Jogindera Sims), NDP, Jinny Sims]

I went to almost eight minutes and I had given a signal ahead of time.

If we get unanimous consent—

[Colin Mayes, Conservative, Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Yes, you're at the pleasure—

[The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jinny Jogindera Sims), NDP, Jinny Sims]

—then there will not be a problem, but members have to realize that it cuts into their time.

Thank you.

Do we have unanimous consent—

[Sadia Groguhé, NDP, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Very well.

[The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jinny Jogindera Sims), NDP, Jinny Sims]

—to hear the recommendations?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jinny Jogindera Sims), NDP, Jinny Sims]

It's your lucky day.

[Michael Mendelson]

Thank you very much.

I'll skip right to the next two recommendations.

First, we recommend a vastly strengthened labour market information system at both the wholesale and what I call the retail level.

Second, through the LMDAs the federal government distributes employer and employee EI funds to the provinces and territories for employment benefits and support, and that's what we're talking about today. Ottawa is the steward of these funds and has the right to insist on more accountability on behalf of EI contributors. This could and should start with much deeper and more meaningful reporting by provinces on both the input and the output of the LMDAs.

Further, governments should work together to develop uniform reporting standards so a national picture can be obtained.

Third and last, LMDA employment benefits and supports need to be better evaluated. For those who know about the evaluation, it is very weak. Good evaluation requires third-party objective review where it's possible, randomized controls, and rigorous statistical and economic analysis. We need to know what is working well and what is not, what makes financial sense and what does not, not as a way of attaching blame but as a way of improving our programs.

The federal government should be requiring high standards for evaluation and should be aggressively promoting best practices.

Let me stop there and let you get on with it.

[The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jinny Jogindera Sims), NDP, Jinny Sims]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go back to Madame Groghué.

[Sadia Groguhé, NDP, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

The committee has repeatedly heard that the labour market information system is inadequate. Many witnesses went even further than that. I'd like to hear what both of you have to say about a message we have been repeating for a long time.

Mr. Allen, Engineers Canada developed its own system to capture labour market information. Could you tell us why you ended up developing your own data collection system? What features does it have? What benefits does it offer? I'd like you to tell us about that.

Then, Mr. Mendelson, I'd like you to tell us more about what you are recommending on the first point.

[Kim Allen]

Sure. Why we ended up developing the labour market system was due likely to the same issues that a number of your witnesses have talked about. It's just a huge, huge gap. To try to plan so people can end up with very successful careers, we're looking at how to actually sustain a very good engineering profession. You need to understand where the gaps are, and we find our labour market study is very regional and very discipline-specific. So with engineering, depending on how you want to quantify it—there are some 75 different disciplines now, and various different parts of the country require different parts of engineering—as you try to engage young people to see engineering as an attractive career, you want to be able to demonstrate that there are lots of possibilities.

One of the features we include, as Mr. Mendelsohn talked about with some of the best practices that we actually use, is confirmation through focus groups of employers. We do our statistical analysis and then we bring in focus groups of employers to ask whether this makes sense—we do that regionally. And so we go across the country and we ask whether all those things make sense, as we publish those types of features. Our target is really to have that continuum, so that not only do we know what we should be training at our universities, but we think it will also help with the immigration systems, particularly as we move to the expression of interest system, and any of the federal skilled worker programs and those types of programs. We need very good labour market data that looks to the future, data that's not five years old and reflecting what the labour market looked like five years ago. What does it look like in five years from now or ten years?

[Sadia Groguhé, NDP, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Mr. Mendelson, could you add to that?

[Michael Mendelson]

The old way of getting data was to do a survey, and that's very extensive, especially if you have to do a detailed firm-level survey, and then it takes a lot of money and a lot of time to analyze the data, which is inevitably, if it's really fast, a year and a half out of date or so, and usually more, which often is inadequate.

In the meantime, Visa, just to pick a company, or Google, has information today about the purchases and the interests of people in the last hour. We need to look at labour market information that's in real time, and the only way to do that is by taking a completely different approach to assembling information, and that is by using what's generally called administrative data. This is not a simple thing to do and it's not inexpensive to develop, although once developed it's much cheaper to maintain. We need data, though, not only at what I call the wholesale level—that is, for researchers and for the federations and so on—but we also need labour market information for ordinary people in Canada.

I have one suggestion in all of the debate about the temporary foreign worker program. What if we had a website where anybody requesting a temporary foreign worker was required to post the job, so that job would be known to anybody in Canada who cared to look at the website? Why couldn't that technology be employed today, so that it would be available right now? As a suggestion, it's not particularly expensive.

I'll just say one more word. Those who remember their social history will recall that in the 1930s there was a demand for something called labour market exchanges, based on the fact people didn't know when and where a job was. So I'm suggesting the modern version of a labour market exchange, based on modern telecommunications technology. I think it's possible.

[The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jinny Jogindera Sims), NDP, Jinny Sims]

Thank you very much.

We'll now move on to Mr. Armstrong.

[Scott Armstrong, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS]

Thank you.

I want to thank our witnesses for being here today.

Mr. Allen, I want to talk a bit more about what I'm now going to call the engineering paradox. You have employers who are looking across the country for engineers with 4 to 10 years' experience before they are willing to hire them. Then you have this cohort of new graduates or newly trained people who don't have this experience but are qualified as engineers academically.

Is the industry looking for the government to solve that? Is the industry willing to put some skin in the game in a mentorship program, an internship program, or an apprenticeship program, much like we saw when we travelled to Germany, to try to solve what I call the engineering paradox? How do employers in your industry see their role in solving this problem?

[Kim Allen]

I think there's a sense of it being on the one hand and then on the other. It's about how they actually get and win the job and be competitive and carry out the business, and yet they also feel that responsibility of bringing along the young people and putting it in there. Employers would welcome any type of program that actually assists them so that they are not at a competitive disadvantage in doing that. If it's creating more overhead in bringing along the people as they're learning to do the jobs and learning to do those ones, it's a burden on the employer as they try to be competitive on whatever project they happen to be working on.

There's a keen interest in developing them and putting them on. Some of the employers are concerned that there's a fair bit of mobility among engineers and that people move firm to firm, so if they invest in that and then the next firm ends up hiring them and so on. But I think if it's done on that kind of subsidized basis through some type of assistance in helping people through that internship period, of getting them in for the first couple of years, and once people are in.... The real challenge with the engineering one, with that whole paradox, is that most of the engineering guys are bright young folks, and they end up getting a job someplace. They don't necessarily end up in engineering. If their first job isn't in engineering, then their career will go off into that path and they are kind of lost to the whole engineering profession, so you end up with the shortage as you come to the experienced ones.

[Scott Armstrong, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS]

There's a problem there, because we have these young people who are investing four to five years of their young lives training for a profession that has barriers to entering as soon as they graduate. Then we have industry telling us that they'd love to have them, but that they're not experienced enough.

In the construction trades, for example, they invest heavily in apprenticeships and in their own training programs. The federal government is there to help. We've invested in the most recent budget in apprenticeship loans. We have paid internship programs now, which we announced in our last budget. I think those programs are moving in the right direction, at least in the skilled trades. Would you not agree ? Would the industry like to engage in some of these to try to help solve this paradox?

[Kim Allen]

Yes. I think they're very similar types of programs that are needed. I think they're probably somewhat different, but I think those types of approaches have worked well with trades in getting people in and getting them the requisite experience so they can move on and practise in that profession. What is needed? How do you get that first one? Once you get that first level of experience, then things will carry on and they'll do just fine.

[Scott Armstrong, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS]

Thank you.

I want to move on to Mr. Mendelson.

In one of your quotes, you talked about how the federal government, since we're providing the bulk of the funding to the provinces, is right to expect accountability for those dollars. Could you expand on that and talk about what type of process we should put in place to hold the provinces to account for these federal tax dollars that are being transferred to them?

[Michael Mendelson]

There is reporting required now by the provinces, but if you look through the reports that the provinces provide you'll find that they are pretty sketchy. It's pretty hard to tell what actually happened and what particular outcomes there were, but also where the inputs really were and what programs are being funded.

As a start, I think just getting together and demanding a level of detail that would allow for an accounting of which programs are being funded by the LMDAs and some kind of measure of the outcomes of those programs in a consistent fashion, so that you can understand the expenditures in each province and compare them, but I think.... I unfortunately look at these things as punitive, and I don't think we should be looking at them as punitive. In the ideal world, the provinces and the federal government should work together to try to define a coherent set of reporting standards that will really be meaningful and allow us to understand what's being spent and what's successful. I think it's reasonable to demand that, because these are contributions from workers and from employers, and they have a right to know what's being done.

[The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jinny Jogindera Sims), NDP, Jinny Sims]

Thank you very much.

I'm sorry, but you're well over your time, Mr. Armstrong.

Mr. Cuzner.

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

Thanks, Madam Chair.

On that, I was going to ask the same, because you're echoing concerns that have been shared by a number of people. Certainly, the manufacturers were here and you pretty much echo what they said, not only on reporting but also on the evaluation of what is reported. That's something that we've heard from several witnesses.

If I could, Mr. Mendelson, with the training wheels off with that report and with some of the comments that have been made on the job grant, one of the comments made was that it's likely to deliver inferior results at higher costs compared to the programs under the current labour market agreements it would displace. Could you expand on that?