Evidence of meeting #30 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was youth.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:45 a.m.
Liberal
Wayne Long Liberal Saint John—Rothesay, NB
How important do you think early learning is in breaking the cycle of generational poverty? Do you foresee a type of federal initiative or program that is right through the school systems? Is that where you would see this?
I read up on Actua. There are programs here and programs there. As you said, there are 25-week programs and after-school programs, but do you envision a more standardized rollout, with federal support, through the whole school system?
9:45 a.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Actua
Nothing that we do is standardized, so the quality and consistency are standard but the content is very customized to a local community, what's happening there, and what is culturally appropriate and geographically appropriate. It's also reflective of the economic development opportunities in those specific areas.
I think it's essential to recognize that there is a role to be played within the formal school system, absolutely, but it is just as essential to have experiences outside of school. Kids have twice the amount of time available for learning outside of school in terms of hours, if you take out eating and sleeping, that they have inside of school. Experiences outside of school that are educational in nature are often treated as something that is done in response to poor education or failures on the part of formal education, and I want to try to break that link.
If the school system were wonderful and every child were still engaged and achieving at the same rate, we would still want to see extracurricular programming outside of school because the kinds of environments that can be created and the kinds of experiences and how those lead to skills development and resilience are unique and different.
I would say that what we are proposing to the federal government in terms of a federal ask would do two things. It would support what's happening in schools in a bigger way, in terms of teacher training, delivery of content, and availability of good content especially on digital skills, but it would also invest in the programming that happens outside of school that is so essential to engaging youth, their parents, their influencers, and their community as a whole.
9:45 a.m.
Liberal
Wayne Long Liberal Saint John—Rothesay, NB
You mentioned in your presentation that when students are in Actua, you also target programs towards their parents.
9:45 a.m.
Liberal
Wayne Long Liberal Saint John—Rothesay, NB
Is that happening, and what programs are you targeting towards parents right now?
9:45 a.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Actua
Yes.
We're doing two things. One is informing parents about the importance of science and technology skills for their kids' futures, not just if they are going to go into those fields but in terms of success more broadly. We're doing things like getting parents to do coding themselves. It's very difficult to get a parent to encourage their child to develop tech skills if they are intimidated, so we're doing things like that.
9:45 a.m.
Liberal
Dan Ruimy Liberal Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC
Thank you very much, everybody, for attending.
Wow—there is some pretty powerful stuff going on around here.
I'd like to direct my comments to Ms. Levine. First of all, it's nice to see that financial literacy programs are popping up around the country and that those issues are being addressed.
Ms. Levine, you mentioned something that really stuck out for me, which was the extremely high unemployment on reserve. I'm going to try to make a connection here between that and the entrepreneurship training, which is lacking, as you were saying, and then sustainability. I know you do a lot of work with entrepreneurship training. It's great that you may be able to go in for 40 hours and teach somebody something, but if you're on reserve and there is nothing there, how do they ever get ahead?
Could you speak to that, please?
9:45 a.m.
Executive Director, Aboriginal Social Enterprise Program, As an Individual
I see this every day. It's enormously frustrating for me to work with communities and not to be able to fully effect change. What I see as an evolving best practice is doing inreach into communities, meaning not taking people out of their communities but actually going into the communities and working with them to identify opportunities, local relevant opportunities.
In many first nations, you see that there is resource development activity happening around the community, but often the community is not participating in that resource development activity. I also see a need to bring in industry. Industry and the community need to come together and understand what business opportunities are there for them to procure services and to build businesses that focus on business-to-business opportunities.
I also see the opportunity to get youth involved at a very early age in entrepreneurship in the communities.
I think that part of the puzzle is going into the communities and not coming in with pre-existing programming but working with the communities to develop the curriculum.
Also, ongoing coaching and mentorship are absolutely essential and not for the typical six months or one year. I think it needs to be of longer duration to actually effect change.
9:50 a.m.
Liberal
Dan Ruimy Liberal Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC
Thank you.
We often look to government for funding, for initiatives, and for taking the leadership role here. I like what you're saying about marrying the industry to some of these communities. Do you have any recommendations on how the government can take a leadership role there?
9:50 a.m.
Executive Director, Aboriginal Social Enterprise Program, As an Individual
In the work that I am doing—it's a new organization—I'm not finding any funding out there to do what I'm proposing to do. The provinces say that they're not necessarily interested. I just don't see the funding pots there.
I have been successful in working with the aboriginal friendship centres in Saskatchewan, and we're going to kick-start something new in Saskatchewan. My hope is to go to communities like La Ronge where there's been a whole host of youth suicides to see if we can spark some innovation and entrepreneurship in the community.
9:50 a.m.
Liberal
Dan Ruimy Liberal Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC
Thank you.
I'm actually going to jump over to Ms. Flanagan. Would you care to comment? Do you have any suggestions?
9:50 a.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Actua
Absolutely. I think your question and Danielle's comments as well are bang on. Kids envision themselves being what they can see, right? You can't be it if you can't see it. One of the things we do before going through an actual experience is to ask them what they want to be when they grow up. They will say things that are obvious and that they can see. They want to work at the hotel. They want to be caterers. They want to drive a taxi. Those are all things that are needed in those communities. At the end of the week, we ask them the same thing, and in between, we bring in folks who are working in those resource development projects. We bring in scientists. We bring in people who are in their communities.
There's an incredible amount happening around those communities. They see people flying in and out. They have no idea what it is, so part of what we're doing, especially in indigenous communities, is creating a bridge between industry and youth. That's difficult. Industry doesn't know how to do that on their own.
9:50 a.m.
Liberal
Dan Ruimy Liberal Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC
I only have about 30 seconds. What role do you see the federal government playing in facilitating that?
9:50 a.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Actua
I see them coming to the table with some matching funds. Part of the challenge is that the corporations have been supporting this for years, and they are saying, “Where is the federal government here?” We want to see this as a tri-sectoral approach, not just a funding approach. We want to see everyone working together to create that web of support.
9:50 a.m.
Conservative
Bob Zimmer Conservative Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC
Thank you, witnesses, for appearing today.
I wanted to speak to Danielle specifically. I am sorry if I missed where you're from. I see that you're based out of Surrey. What would you say is home for you?
9:50 a.m.
Executive Director, Aboriginal Social Enterprise Program, As an Individual
I grew up in Winnipeg. My indigenous roots are in Winnipeg. I'm also very familiar with northern Manitoba and northern Saskatchewan, but my home base is Maple Ridge, British Columbia.
9:55 a.m.
Conservative
Bob Zimmer Conservative Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC
I see. I guess you did say that. I'm from British Columbia myself, and one of the foundational things that a member of Parliament from B.C., even from my riding.... I have many reserves in my riding. I was a teacher before, and I taught a lot of aboriginal students. They were great kids who had a lot of promise. They started to build businesses themselves, and so on, but I agree that there needs to be a lot of determination to do that.
The bottom line is that I think one of the issues, which you mentioned too, is proximity to opportunity. Our reserves are very remote. Some are closer to opportunity than others. I define opportunity as a project. It could be a mine. It could be forestry. It could be natural gas development, and so forth. Certainly, there are more opportunities than just working in those fields. It could be otherwise, where you get an MBA or something else, and you go off to find those opportunities.
If you were to do three things.... As a model reserve—let's call it reserve A—with 95% unemployment, as you referred to in one particular place....
We had Chief Charleyboy speak to us. Many people in the room might know of the Fish Lake mine project. It was a controversial mine in the middle of B.C. around Williams Lake. When Chief Charleyboy spoke to the B.C. caucus a couple years ago, he said, “We have 95% unemployment. We have no hope for our people. There's no opportunity. Guess what our kids are getting involved in because there's no opportunity? It's drugs. It's anything you do when you don't have something productive to do.”
The study is based on strategy reduction, essentially. What three things would you do to eliminate poverty on reserve? What would be your three magic bullets?
9:55 a.m.
Executive Director, Aboriginal Social Enterprise Program, As an Individual
The overarching theme would be around economic reconciliation, for one.
9:55 a.m.
Conservative
Bob Zimmer Conservative Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC
Can you define that? Just explain that a bit.
