Chair Morrissey, thank you so much.
Honoured members of the committee, I appreciate greatly the opportunity to speak to you today to address one of the most pressing public policy issues facing Canadians and the future quality of all of our lives—labour shortages and working conditions in the care economy.
I thank Bonita Zarrillo for tabling the motion to study the issue.
You may not know me. I'm an economist, past president of the Canadian Association for Business Economics, and business columnist for the Toronto Star. I'm also the Atkinson fellow on the future of workers, and I am indebted to the support of the Atkinson Foundation, which dedicates itself to advancing economic and social justice principles, as did Joseph Atkinson, journalist and business founder of one of Canada's most popular and historically influential newspapers, the Toronto Star.
He knew then, as you know today, that strong businesses are made stronger when their workers and their customers are not scrambling to cover their basic needs. That requires strong governments dedicated to ensuring that programs like health care, child care and elder care—which support the economy every bit as much as roads and bridges—are both in good repair and fit for purpose.
The care economy is often viewed as a derivative, a “nice to have” once the economy is functioning. It is not, and as the pandemic has made abundantly clear, it provides the foundation for all other economic activity. It happens to be an economic powerhouse in its own right, accounting for 12.6% of GDP. Did you know that's bigger than the auto and oil and gas sectors? It's actually unparalleled by any sector of the economy other than finance and real estate—and we know how well that goes.
Care for those who are too young, too old and too sick to work is always partly unpaid. It is always a labour of love, but paid care now accounts for one in five jobs in Canada. Though every job could be a great job in this sector, many jobs are unpaid and precarious. Maybe that's because it's female-dominated. Upwards of 90% of workers in most occupations within health and education are women, and the workforce is also disproportionately racialized.
Viewed as essential, these workers are essentially treated as disposable. Population aging means that this sector of the economy is destined to grow, so how it grows matters. Already, we are facing labour shortages in small towns and big cities alike, so how we address the shortages matters because it will shape our economy and our nation. We can make every job a good job, and we would transform all of society in the doing, or we can muddle through, mostly failing to solve the problems.
Right now, there is no more pressing labour market issue than how we prepare the care economy for the decades of population aging that lie ahead, making today's challenges pale in comparison.
In order to maximize our potential and minimize the impending challenges, we need a pan-Canadian strategy so that no province loses out. Your earlier questions to other witnesses on other days have presaged what that strategy might entail.
First, we need better wages and working conditions, which are possible because so much of the care economy is publicly funded. Second, we need more timely and targeted training, including “learning while earning” programs. Third, we need an alignment of federal skills development policies for our own citizens, with federal policies to attract newcomers. These newcomers are increasingly entering as temporary residents; not immigrants who stay and build communities, not just fill jobs. Fourth, we need more rapid credentialing of internationally trained professionals and more paths to permanence for those who enter as temporary foreign workers. On your very first day, you learned that the temporary foreign worker program accounts for only 0.4% of the labour force, but hundreds of thousands of other people enter as temporary residents under different programs and work as well.
Better use of technology is obviously another element. We can improve timely access to supports, more telehealth, better use of AI to complement human skills for faster diagnostics and better diagnostics, improved used of e-health records to improve wait times and detect trends more quickly. Finally, we need better monitoring of the ballooning of temporary agencies and on-demand apps, because they tend to produce cost overruns, and they tend to increase exploitation through scheduling. That means modernizing our labour laws to reduce the growing number of people who are misclassified as independent contractors and are not able to access any labour protections or rights.
We urgently need a national strategy for health human resources, and we urgently need standards for long-term care before the federal government dishes out another dollar, building on what we have learned through the early learning and child care bilateral agreements that have been signed over the past year.
I do wish you Godspeed on your efforts to help inform and guide our next steps.
I am happy to take your questions.
Thank you again.