Human Resources Committee on Nov. 17th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Good morning, everybody.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Monday, June 13, 2016, the committee is resuming its study of poverty reduction strategies.

Today we have a full slate of witnesses as well as somebody who is appearing via video conference.

From the Canadian Council for Career Development, we have Liz Bezanson, executive board member.

[Lynne Bezanson, Executive Board Member, Canadian Council for Career Development]

It's Lynne.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

It's Lynne. Sorry about that.

From the Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada, we have Rachel Gouin, director of research and public policy, and Achan Akwai Cham, volunteer and alumnus.

Did I totally butcher that? I'm sorry.

[Achan Akwai Cham, Volunteer and Alumna, Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada]

It's okay.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

It's okay? All right.

From the Canadian Teachers' Federation, we have Heather Smith, president, and Robert McGahey, director of advocacy and labour rights.

From Canadian Labour Congress, we have Emily Norgang, senior researcher.

Coming to us via audio only, from Pathfinder Youth Centre Society, we have Orville Lee, president and co-founder, and Ruth Lee, executive director and co-founder.

Welcome, everyone. We are going to get started right away because we have so many witnesses today.

Starting us off is Lynne for seven minutes.

Go ahead, please.

[Lynne Bezanson]

Thank you, Mr. May, and thank you for the opportunity to be here this morning.

I represent the Canadian Council for Career Development, which is a voluntary coalition of leaders in career development from all provinces, who help Canadians of all ages to navigate learning and work successfully.

We all know that the best routes out of poverty are through education and work, but accessing both has become increasingly difficult in Canada.

First, I'd like to set the context. Canada rates first among industrialized countries in the proportion of our citizens with university or college degrees or diplomas. That is the very good news. We also have the highest rates of post-secondary education degree-holders in the OECD who are working in jobs from which they earn half or below half of the median income, which is the commonly accepted cut-off point for poverty. Indigenous and immigrant youth face even greater challenges, as do youth with disabilities and youth already living in poverty. There is increasing evidence that many youth are beginning to question the value of any kind of post-secondary education, and that should worry us very much indeed.

A Sun Life study in 2012 also found that 86% of 18- to 24-year-olds report excessive stress attributed to underemployment or the prospects of employment or the lack thereof. The direct links between stress and mental illness are absolutely indisputable. In its 2014 report, the Chamber of Commerce stated that improving the pathways for youth from education to employment is of national importance, if not a national emergency. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that career education and support services over the lifespan as well as workplace learning opportunities produce positive education and labour market outcomes, not in isolation but as key components, and in Canada they are traditionally underused as accessible and affordable labour market and poverty reduction strategies.

I don't have time today to draw attention to some of these research results, but I'd be very pleased to give you references for your review later.

There are also, of course, major challenges. Access to career services, especially for those in transition between school and work, or between work and work, are not consistent and they're not coordinated. Career pathways for youth are fragmented, and there are huge gaps in collaboration among stakeholders, primarily educational institutions and the business community. Entry standards and clear pathways to employment in areas of skills shortage remain very unclear. Entry-level jobs are increasingly less a first step and more commonly a dead end, offering precarious work and low pay.

A review done by Maclean's in 2014 reviewed job advertisements and entry-level positions on three major career websites and showed that even for these jobs, employers were demanding two to five years of work experience. Work experience is very hard to come by, and everybody blames everybody else. The employer community blames educators for not giving them the graduates it needs. Educators blame business for not giving graduates opportunity, and inflating job qualifications. Career services are blamed for using tools that result in all of the horror stories you've heard about—things like computers spitting out that we should all be undertakers. And, of course, everybody blames governments. The blame game is getting us absolutely nowhere.

So how do you move forward and how can leadership from the career development community support you? I turn to this now.

Number one—and this is a big one—we need a national school-to-work transition strategy that is built on a solid foundation of what has worked in other countries and what is being done in pockets of excellence across Canada. We currently have no mechanism to bring the critical partners together in order to build that foundation on what has already been done and what is known to be working. Critical partners, of course, include educators, employers, career leaders, social service leaders, the mental health system, and provincial and territorial governments. We can't build such a strategy overnight, but it can be built strategically and systematically and co-operatively, and it could move us out of the blame game towards a strategic planning game.

Bringing these stakeholders together is something the federal government can do without tripping over jurisdictional boundaries. It has been done before by our own career development community and many others. There are many pockets of excellence here and internationally that we can draw on. This is likely a five-year strategy, but it's a most worthwhile one and certainly one that could begin to bring optimism to youth and marginalized groups, and at the same time it could tackle some major contributors to poverty.

The second burning issue we want to raise with you is the importance for youth to have opportunities for workplace learning. Access to work experience or co-op programs at both secondary and post-secondary levels is very limited, as is access to paid internships. Even volunteer organizations are increasingly asking for experience from those seeking to volunteer. Researchers in career development have studied access to workplace learning across Canada and have uncovered consistent trends.

The problem is not a lack of good programs; we have excellent programs. The problem is with access, implementation, and sustained funding.

We also have very few incentives to encourage employers to hire young graduates and to provide them with some job training to help them be successful. Our rate of job training for young people is way down in this country compared with in others.

We need a way to bring the business community forward so we can hear their challenges and hear about what is needed for them to be able to open more opportunities for youth, disadvantaged or otherwise. We also need to begin to work to address some of those barriers.

We'd also like to recommend consideration of programs modelled after successful former initiatives such as Youth Service Canada or maybe Katimavik, or new spinoffs you can come up with, that provide young people with practical work experience but that also benefit their communities.

This could be part of a demand-focused strategy providing young people with experience in areas of potential growth and opportunity, such as the environmental green sector.

An idea to consider would be some form of debt forgiveness. Maybe there could be one year of tuition forgiven after six months or one year of volunteering at a community-based work experience that pays them only minimum wage. We're convinced there would be enormous long-term cost savings from this kind of initiative in moving forward.

These two initiatives, creating the mechanisms for developing a national school-to-work transition strategy and building work experience in demand sectors of the economy, if undertaken in the collaborative spirit I've tried to describe, would go a long way to mitigating against what the Chamber of Commerce termed a national emergency. That may be a slight overstatement, but it's not far off the mark.

We simply can't have a labour market that's increasingly difficult for Canadians to navigate, that sets up impenetrable barriers such as no job without work experience and no chance to get it, that turns entry-level jobs into permanent precarious jobs leading to poverty, and that creates pessimism and absence of hope for the future.

We need to focus on making the school-to-work transition less fraught with dead ends. To tackle this we need to build on existing excellence, we need a framework, and we need to have mechanisms to bring the critical stakeholders to the table to help us make this happen.

Our council for career development will be allies in helping you move forward.

I thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you, Lynne.

Now, from the Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada, we have Rachel Gouin.

[Dr. Rachel Gouin, Director, Research and Public Policy, Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for having us today. We're honoured to be part of this discussion on poverty reduction.

I'll let Achan kick us off.

[Achan Akwai Cham]

Good morning, everyone. My name is Achan. I'm a Boys and Girls Club alumna. I went to the Ottawa Clubhouse, but there are 650 locations across Canada and over 250,000 youth who are served throughout the country each year.

My involvement began in 2002 when I moved to Canada as a refugee from Sudan. The club was a safe place for my siblings and me to go to because we lived in a high-risk community, and the club provided educational recreational leadership programs. I was able to get my first job as a youth worker at the age of 16, so I went on to study social service work, working in addictions a little bit out in Calgary. It was a really great experience. I'm now a post-secondary graduate and advocating for equal education opportunities for people in my community and across Canada.

It's really important for me to speak to you about the role of education in reducing poverty, because I see many people in my community who don't have the opportunity to reach their full potential. They don't have access to resources such as summer camps and homework help, which I think would be really helpful for especially children and youth. My hope is to see the government invest in more programs for young people to find different ways to go to school, whether that would be colleges, universities, or apprenticeships, just to find different creative ways to also encourage them. Children and youth who are living in poverty are exposed to difficult social environments, housing insecurity, and food insecurity as well, which makes it difficult for them to succeed in education, whether that be elementary or high school and so on and so forth. Sometimes you just need a little bit of encouragement as well.

At the Boys and Girls Club, I was able to have my mentors sit down with me each week to give me information about which programs to apply to, how to get scholarships, and what to expect when you first move away for school. That was really important for me. My twin sister went on to study art therapy. She still is going strong and finding her way. I'm really excited for her. I am currently job hunting like every other post-secondary graduate in the country and trying to find.... I'm just keeping busy with my volunteering.

I think the most important thing I want you guys to take away from this is that by providing educational opportunities, we can ensure that young people across Canada can do better for themselves and for their families as well, and can help this country move forward.

Thank you.

[Dr. Rachel Gouin]

I would just add that addressing low income as a source of disadvantage is certainly important, but more is needed to close the gap in educational outcomes. Programs for young people and access to recreation, arts, and leadership opportunities are things that enrich communities and make sure that kids have all they need to succeed. After-school programs are important, and summer camps help reduce learning loss during the summer. They give young people the support they need, so that they can at least achieve at the same level as their peers or they're not falling behind. After-school programs are recognized for their positive impact on emotional and physical health and education. That's well documented. Boys and Girls Clubs has partnered with Rogers Communications to offer Rogers Raising the Grade, which is a program that helps young people get through high school, identify their career objectives, and figure out how to apply for post-secondary education—everything that Achan was talking about.

I think that access to after-school programs is an important component of a national poverty reduction strategy, and we're hoping to see some thought given to how we can support access to such programs in impoverished communities.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

Now we go over to Heather Smith from the Canadian Teachers' Federation.

[Heather Smith, President, Canadian Teachers' Federation]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for the opportunity to present today. We're pleased that the government has committed to developing a national poverty reduction plan and, while our focus today will be on education, I do believe there needs to be a broad, more societal, multi-faceted approach. I'm here representing close to half a million teachers in Canada, but I'm a teacher. I have seen poverty first-hand. I was in a school until 2015, and I have over 34 years of teaching experience within the public system in New Brunswick. I've bought food; I've bought school supplies; and I've clothed kids, so when I'm making my points today, I have faces in my head. Teachers see children living in poverty on a daily basis.

Certainly addressing poverty means addressing family poverty. These children are not there on their own for the most part; they have families that are struggling as well. As teachers, we do that as well. We reach out to families and try to provide some of that support.

We congratulate the government on taking a step in that direction with the Canada child benefit, but we really need to look more broadly than at just youth and schools. We need to talk about affordable housing, rental housing, addressing precarious work and underemployment, and we've heard about it right here. We do need to invest in our families, because those are the children who are our future.

Schools can be a hub for the provision of these services. In the education sector we're hearing about cuts and school closures. There is space in schools for the school to be a community hub for the provision of these services. I'm familiar with a school in New Brunswick that actually has done that. When their health centre was going to close, the community lobbied to have those services there. Not only are the services provided in the school, parents don't need to drive, and they don't need to worry about transportation costs. They don't need to worry about taking time off work to get these services for their children, because they're right in the school building. Students are not losing much learning time. The school and the community health centre work together, and the professionals within the centre work together.

We need to have a plan to address issues involving students that addresses hunger and youth and child mental health. Schools can be an entry point. I think schools are already an informal entry point for this, but the services just aren't there for us to provide to students. Education is the key to lifting children out of poverty. Children need access to education that's free from impacts of privatization and other forms of social streaming.

Really, K-12 schools are preparing children for a workplace that may not even exist yet, for jobs that are not even developed yet. We have no idea what they'll need to do. They need a broad base of skills like critical thinking and problem solving, which we call soft skills. They are not the hard academics of reading and math that seem to be where we have put the focus. International standardized testing has done some of that, but schools are much broader. We need to have social programming, and there are all kinds of opportunities that we're missing.

Speaking of access to higher education, we had a pilot project here in Canada called Future To Discover. We had students in New Brunswick and Manitoba who were offered voluntary after-school career counselling. They were also offered funding if they enrolled in post-secondary. They needed to be in their second year to access that funding, but these students were offered the funding when they were in Grade 10.

The initial cost-benefit analysis showed low administrative costs. For every dollar spent, the return was between $2.40 and $3.00. That project is there, and it's a longitudinal study, so they're still following these students as they go further in their life, and we have some of that pilot project work here Canada.

They also found, for students who were involved in this project in high school, that it affected their choices of courses, and it also affected their engagement in school. They were more apt to graduate, so it not only affected their post-high school years; it affected their high school years as well.

Public education is a societal good. We call it the great equalizer. To some extent that's true, but I think it could be more so.

Students transition from K-to-12 schools into the workplace, but really school is not the place to provide that training. Employers need to provide that on-the-job training. Schools need to provide the broad base so students can continue that learning once they enter the workforce.

We talked about facility in another language. We believe all students in Canada should have the opportunity to learn a second language. We are a bilingual country. All students need to have that opportunity, and not just in specialized programs.

There are apprenticeship possibilities that happen within schools. At present there are co-op programs and there are apprenticeship programs in education sectors across the country. There is a bit of a challenge to this, though, because it's up to the apprentices to find the experienced masters who are willing to take on the apprenticeships. We have teachers who are beating the bushes to make sure they have enough placements for students within the areas in which they have an interest, but they may be reluctant to take on an apprentice. I think the governments could focus more on how they could provide incentives to do that.

That brings me to financial literacy. It seems that everything people think kids need to know, schools need to do. We've been using financial literacy for years. I taught elementary school. I used money to teach. We counted nickels and dimes, and that's how we counted. We counted by fives and tens, because it's tangible. We've done a lot of that in high schools. That extends even further.

In conclusion, Canadian teachers see the effects of poverty on a daily basis in the children and the youth that are right in front of us. As I said, I have faces in my head as I say this. Actually, we owe it to these students, we owe it to their families, and we actually owe it to our country to address this need.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

My mom's a teacher, so I totally understand where you're coming from and I appreciate the work you have done.

Now from the Canadian Labour Congress, Emily, go ahead for seven minutes, please.

[Emily Norgang, Senior Researcher, Canadian Labour Congress]

Thanks for the opportunity to speak today and for asking the CLC to speak about our research report on young workers in Canada. One of the most important poverty reduction strategies is the assurance of decent work for young Canadians. Education and training are cornerstones of this, and there is a lot that governments and employers can do and really should be doing to strengthen these links.

It really has been a tough few decades for young Canadians. We've seen global trends like the growing service sector, the rise in non-standard forms of employment, globalization, and technological change and innovation, and they're truly transforming the world of work. There are a lot of opportunities here and great potential, but because of a lack of regulations, policies, and programs, precarious forms of work have risen, economic inequality has expanded, and young people have been disproportionately affected.

Canadians are the most highly educated people in the world. We rank first among OECD countries for post-secondary education completion rates. While enrolment in universities, colleges, and apprenticeships continues to rise, so do tuition fees. More than at any other point in history, students are now balancing school and work just to make ends meet. Despite this record number of students holding part-time work, they're still carrying record levels of debt, and student debt continues to balloon.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of young Canadians are coming out of school with record debt, but they're unable to find decent work, and certainly not work that is making use of their skills and expertise. The job market is truly failing young Canadians, and student debt is quickly transforming into family debt. Our report found that now young people in record numbers are forced to live with their parents, are delaying marriage, and are delaying having children.

The youth unemployment rate is double that of the core-age unemployment rate. Underemployment has now reached 26%. One in four young Canadians is underemployed. Almost one-third of young people are now in temporary work. This compares to about 10% of core-age workers. About one-half of young people are in part-time employment. We need to bust the myth that they're in part-time employment by choice. This is the case for some, but one in five is in part-time employment involuntarily, because there's just nothing else available.

For these reasons, young people are also more likely to hold multiple jobs, especially young women. Young people are unable or are very unlikely to have access to workplace pensions and benefits. Only 9% of young workers in their early 20s have a pension plan. This compares to about 37% of those in their early 50s.

We are also seeing a drastic rise of employers misclassifying workers as self-employed. Doing this is really shifting the costs and risks of owning a business onto the workers themselves. It also denies workers basic protections like minimum wages and hours of work. This trend is also impacting access to employment insurance and other social services. This is especially problematic given the rise in temporary employment and that fact that young people aren't able to access EI between periods of this kind of work.

Precarious work has become the new norm for people in Canada. The impact on youth poverty is drastic. Today the total amount of debt carried by young people is double what it was in 1999, and 15% of Canadians between 20 and 35 now live in poverty.

The labour market is failing young people. It's scarring them for later in life. The consequences are higher risks of poverty throughout life and the expansion of numbers of working poor.

The federal government has taken some positive steps toward improving training and the labour market for young people. The Canada summer jobs program is an excellent step, and it's exactly what we need to be doing, but it should go beyond just the summer months. It needs to continue year-round. We should be exploring a youth guarantee, such as they're doing in Europe. This would guarantee all young Canadians either training or employment. It would really help to smooth and bridge the transition into the workforce.

Although registered apprenticeship is on the rise, it still only represents about 2.5% of the workforce, which is a very small percentage of the workforce, and completion rates remain very low.

This means that people who are going through apprenticeships are not actually benefiting from the wage premium that comes out of completing and certification.

Women and people of colour are drastically under-represented in apprenticeships, and this is something that needs to be addressed. Women represent only about 14% of apprenticeships, and if you remove some of the lower-wage positions, such as aesthetics and hair styling, women represent only 4% of apprenticeships in Canada.

Both employers and governments need to be doing more to support and promote apprenticeship training, and we need to be doing more to support young workers once they're in the workforce. Government should be exploring legislation that bans two-tier contracts, and reviewing and revising employment standards and labour laws to ensure that they have really kept up with the changing nature of work.

Within this picture, it's very important to remember that Canadian youth are the most diverse generation in history. We have growing numbers of newcomers, young people of colour, and aboriginal youth. There is also a growing awareness of the presence and needs of LGBTQ youth, and youth with disabilities. Although it's not as present as within the core-age population, discrimination continues to exist in terms of access to education, in hiring practices, and within the workplace.

It is essential that strategies to reduce poverty through the realization of decent work take into account this diversity and ensure equal opportunities for all.

Thank you for this opportunity. I look forward to answering any questions about our report.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

Now via audio, we have Orville and Ruth Lee from the Pathfinder Youth Centre Society.

[Orville Lee, President and Co-Founder, Pathfinder Youth Centre Society]

Good morning.

[Ruth Lee, Executive Director and Co-Founder, Pathfinder Youth Centre Society]

Good morning.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Good morning.

You have seven minutes. Go ahead, please.

[Orville Lee]

Thank you. Good morning, committee and Mr. May. Thank you for inviting us.

We are a non-profit organization that works with at-risk youth and youth in care. Our demographics are our programs deal with employment retention, life skills, and mentorship. We find that the key to our programs or the mentorship component.... I'm also joined by Ruth, our Executive Director, so I'll have her explain our skills links programs, which we offer through our organization.

[Ruth Lee]

Good morning, everyone.

We currently run two programs that serve the Lower Mainland but focus on different communities. We are servicing Surrey, which is the highest-growing city in Vancouver, as well as Maple Ridge.

We want to be more solution-based. In terms of the demographics we service, we see a lot of mental health issues, people recovering from drugs and alcohol, homelessness, and the cycle of families remaining in poverty. Our programs bring things back to basics. We try to service the emotional, physical, and mental needs of an individual, so all the programs are customized to address their particular situation. We try to build them up, and build up their self-esteem and self-confidence. We find that once we can build that strong relationship, we can move forward in implementing their work experience and knowledge and can deal with the soft skills, so when they go into a job, if somebody upsets them, they can go into conflict resolution.

All our programs have them leave with a tool box that they can go back and dig into so they can address situational things that happen at work. We find that the 24-hour mentorship we provide is probably the key to the success of these programs. Needs and issues don't stop at 5 o'clock. Right now, because of limited resources, it's Orville and I who capture what happens to them after they leave work or after our office is closed. There is an emergency number that ties directly to us, so there's continual 24-hour support.

It's very challenging to deal with the youth we deal with, because we are trying to undo 19 or 20 years of habit, as well as cultural, historical, and family cycles and issues, and we are trying to undo those in 17 weeks. We actually started this out of our basement. In the first program we were blessed with, through Service Canada, they allowed us to work with the youth for six months. As we transitioned, it just kept getting shorter and shorter, so our limit to try to address the issues started to become really challenging. More time....

We encourage community involvement. It takes a village to raise a child, so that's the mantra we hang on to as an organization. We can't make one individual perfect, so we need the help of the government. We need the help of employers who are willing to give these youth a chance, a foot in the door, just so they can expand and grow.

One of the things we just handed in is a program that we want to start, which is opening a thrift store. It's addressing sustainability for our organization. It's kind of like a workplace learning centre. Instead of getting them out right away after five weeks of being in class, we are going to keep them for another five weeks so that we can address the workplace issues they have. Our staff will be there to watch and monitor how they work and their work ethic. We want to make them as perfect as possible as employees, and then we go out into the workforce and get the community involved with different employers.

The issue we really find prevalent is mental health. If we can get more services dealing with mental health.... That seems to be the key factor in people progressing and choosing other options to try to figure out how they are going to deal with poverty. We have a good number of youth who steal, because they don't have food to eat.

They try to go into survival mode. Eating is a basic need, and again we try to address that by having an in-house food bank. If any youth walks by and looks hungry, or we see that they have a need, then we provide food for them; they don't even have to be in our program. It's been challenging to help them, to funnel them back into the bigger food banks, because food's very scarce. People aren't donating to the food banks the way they used to, so we try to address that in house, and we try to give them clothing too. We do drives to get interview clothing and clothing just for day to day.

As you can see, all our programs just address basic needs, and so it's a holistic approach. It's bringing it back to basics, really, but if we can get more mental health supports.... We as an organization don't have the finances or the ability to hire psychologists and stuff like that, so we use our community to help address that, but it's getting limited. We have kids who want to commit suicide, but they call the hotline and they're put on hold, or they have to wait three weeks before they see a mental health worker.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Ms. Lee, I'm sorry to interrupt, but we're running a little over time. Could you come to a conclusion?

[Ruth Lee]

Okay, thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

I'll give you another 30 seconds.

[Orville Lee]

In a nutshell, we want to stress the fact that the key to all the programs we've been running for the last 13 years is the mentorship component. That's the key and that's the glue that brings everything together and gives us the success we do have, and hopefully we can continue doing what we're doing, which will definitely assist in breaking the cycle of poverty.

[Ruth Lee]

Thank you.