I would love to. Thank you very much.
There are a couple of policies that I didn't get to, so I'm going to get to those first, and then we'll go on to a few other things.
Stop assuming that companies will build the opportunities that young workers and new graduates want, and start requiring that firms build the opportunities that young workers want. That's where we need to start going with this conversation. It's not about creating more skills. We have an incredibly highly skilled workforce in this country, including young people. We need to be creating opportunities that actually increase our well-being because we're actually being utilized and challenged at work. It's increasing productivity, as well, in the economy. We need both of those things.
If we look at the role the immigration policy has played in the last few years, we see that we ended up focusing on a low-wage strategy. That's not what we need in order to create better jobs, in order to increase well-being and in order to increase productivity. We need a high-wage strategy that creates better jobs that actually meet the demands of young people and the rest of the workers in this country who want the opportunity to use the skills they have.
For too long, Canada's policy environment has assumed that the demand side for labour is exactly right, while workers, the supply side, have been required to consistently guess what employers want and when they want it. We're always guessing; they're always perfect. It's time to look at the demand side of the ledger and ask employers to consider revamping the types of opportunities they're creating.
There are a couple of other things that we could look at. One is system-wide assessments for skills, competencies and abilities to help governments and employers understand the workforce beyond the credentials that are on their résumés. There are a lot of things that we can do to prove the skills we have, but there are a lot of skills we have that don't have credentials, so let's make sure that we're able to recognize both.
We could also talk about manager training to help employers learn to recognize and leverage the potential skills within their teams instead of just always looking at cost-cutting, which is supposedly efficiency but actually is reducing productivity. They need to build pathways for workers to build skills over time instead of requiring five years of experience right off the bat.