Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Feb. 28th, 2019

[Josée Bégin]

I would say that our role is really to provide the evidence. I can't speculate as to whether or not this is sufficient, or what the impact would be. If you are interested in having more detailed information on our labour projections and fertility rates, we would gladly provide you with that.

[Salma Zahid]

Mr. Johnson, would you like to add to that?

[Stephen Johnson]

I think the information presented by my colleagues from Statistics Canada demonstrates the important role that immigration has played recently, and is projected to play, in terms of overall workforce growth, and continuing to support economic growth. The data shows a question around whether it's sufficient. Is it too little? Is it too much? It's inherently challenging, I think the committee would recognize.

One thing that we haven't mentioned yet today is that increasingly, we hear discussions around what's often described as the changing nature of work. In addition to long-standing demographic trends, or an aging population and globalization, is this notion of the fourth industrial revolution and the adoption of new technology, and to what extent the pace of that adoption will actually change both the number and nature of the skills being looked at. That has the potential to greatly influence and change our scenario and trajectory, moving forward.

[Salma Zahid]

With regard to skilled and unskilled immigration, are there any models from other countries that you have examined that may offer models and innovations Canada should consider?

[Stephen Johnson]

Again, unfortunately, I'm not in a position to comment as an expert in that area. I'm in the skills and employment branch at Employment and Social Development Canada. I could speak a little bit about our transfers to provinces and territories and other things for adult training and skills training, but I don't have much background or expertise to provide the committee concerning immigration.

[Salma Zahid]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Mr. Maguire.

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

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today.

I want to reiterate what the chair indicated in his opening remarks. Some of the things I heard weren't exactly what I'm hearing on the ground in my tours of Canada concerning some industries, particularly—coming from an agricultural background myself—in agricultural areas.

We have great potential in this country for producing many products. Processing them is the shortfall. We're finding we need labour on both sides. We've done a good job of developing export markets for these products, but if we don't get them off our shores, some other country is going to do it.

I'm looking at the sentence in your concluding remarks, Mr. Johnson, “ESDC is continuously working with a range of partners and stakeholders to develop and improve its understanding of labour market dynamics.”

I think there are some gaps here with regard to what we're hearing from witnesses, those who just came here today as well as others who have appeared before the committee before. My colleague, the chair of our committee, outlined this point very well in the comments he made. He called it a rant; I call it a fact-finding exercise. We're short thousands of people in some of these processing industries. That's what they're telling me, and I know my colleagues on the government side know it as well.

How do we fix that?

I had a bunch of questions here that I was going to table, but they really aren't meant for your area. Mr. Chair, I know we're wanting to wrap this up as much as we can, but there still seem to be some unanswered questions that you, I and our colleagues across the way may have. I'm wondering whether at some point we might ask someone back, whether from Services Canada or whoever the people may be to deal with some of the work permit issues we're dealing with.

I just put this forth to you and my fellow committee members. We can deal with it later.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Just while you're on that point, we'll stop the clock for a minute. It seems to me that we tend to not do this work; HUMA does it. It is, though, affecting our committee work, and we may want to have the kind of briefing we would have from IRCC on the basics of the programs and the way they work. It's not our specialty, but it is affecting IRCC.

We are just trying to work out how we might need some more time on this; that's all we were doing. We'll hold that thought, but I think it might be helpful for us to have a little bit more from ESDC on this issue, so we'll try to do something.

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

Okay.

My colleague from British Columbia has a few questions.

[Dan Albas, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate your having me at the committee and my colleague's letting me share some of the time.

I came prepared to ask a few more question on the temporary foreign worker program.

For example, in the Okanagan valley and the Similkameen valley as well, I had complaints last year that many farmers were unable to have their temporary foreign worker permits processed on a timely basis because of issues, apparently, with the embassy that was meant to process them. This caused millions of dollars in crop damage because they weren't able to pick successfully.

This may not be the right committee or the right group to study this, but I think it's really important that the timeliness...especially given the seasonal agricultural worker program and just its name, “seasonal”. It's very important for us to be able to study this.

One thing in the Okanagan that has also come to my attention is that there are great facilities, such as Okanagan College and UBC Okanagan. I'd therefore ask ask Statistics Canada this question.

One challenge that many of the university professors have brought to me is that it's difficult to access some of your raw data so that they can combine it in a way that's meaningful for dealing with some of the skills and labour shortages specifically in the Okanagan.

I'm not sure whether you're able to pass this on or how you would like to respond to it. Could you speak to it?

[Josée Bégin]

I can speak to that. Access to data is something we often hear about. In the last few years, Statistics Canada has gone to modernization efforts to improve access to our data via various methods. For instance, if you come to the Statistics Canada website, all the information is free now. That wasn't the case a few years ago. We also have projects we are working on to increase virtual access to our data as well. We are engaged in a lot of efforts. We know it's not perfect, but—

[Dan Albas]

Stephen Gordon, from McGill, would absolutely agree with that assessment. However, again, what I'm speaking about is the standards that are required for StatsCan to be able to have a university patch in. Right now, many of them have to drive or fly to Vancouver to pull out that information. It would greatly help in my region to have better access to understand those things.

With regard to the labour market, I certainly appreciate Mr. Johnson's intervention when he talked about the reason for the 10-year average. Because there have been a lot of changes in provincial policy in terms of minimum wage, as well as demographic shifts in particular areas, urbanization and whatnot, I imagine it can be very difficult to be able to point out the trends, other than if you look back from a bigger picture.

In some of the regions of Canada, in Kelowna, for example, the chamber of commerce has put together an economic scorecard where they're trying to evaluate how they can best deal with some of those challenges.

What are some of the things we can tell our constituents or some of these groups that want to get more information, that want to be able to utilize this data better? What are some of the suggestions you would have?

[Stephen Johnson]

In terms of British Columbia, there's a WorkBC provincial website that has really good labour market information. There is also the national Job Bank, which is both a job board for employers to post jobs and the centrepiece where we present the labour market information we produce. It is free and bilingual. That information is available.

We also put it in the government's open data store, which isn't always the most obvious place for users who aren't sophisticated to go in and find it, but certainly the standard information that we do have is available.

As my colleague was mentioning, there can be special tabulations or access to the raw data, which are a little more sophisticated. As you say, it is only in about 30 or 35 centres across the country, so it's somewhat more limited.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

You have 20 seconds.

[Dan Albas]

With regard to certain pools of labour, you might have retired baby boomers who suddenly come back to work on a temporary basis; and obviously when you have temporary foreign workers or new Canadians who are coming into the job market, it must be difficult to track and to be able to give proper overviews.

Is this something that you guys wrestle with on a regular basis, how to provide that just-in-time information?

[Stephen Johnson]

In terms of the just-in-time and the granular data, that's why actually using the Job Bank, which I'm responsible for as well, is about the closest we get to a real-time source of both employers, and to a more limited extent, some job seekers who actually create accounts. We can find those to be very detailed sources of insight. There is not sufficient volume and coverage to give us great confidence at every corner of the country, but there are places where we can pick up those signals.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you. I need to stop you there.

Ms. Kwan, you have seven minutes.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you to all the witnesses for their presentations.

My questions are in two areas. Job security would be a component of the issue of attracting people to jobs, as would living wages and benefits. We hear a lot from employers who can't attract people to jobs.

Do you keep statistics on wage growth, workplace injuries, employers or benefits that are provided to the workers? Do you have any of those statistics that would shed some light with respect to the issue of attraction and retention of employees?

[Josée Bégin]

At Statistics Canada, we have various sources of information, whether it's administration or survey information, that help us shed some light in terms of indicators for benefits, as an example, and in terms of income information or pension information.

You mentioned workplace injuries or illnesses. We do not collect information on that.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Whatever you have available, is it something you can pass on to our committee so that we get a sense of the lay of the land?

[Josée Bégin]

Yes. We could definitely provide you with some additional information.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

That would be great. If you can break it down by sector so that we know what area of work we're talking about, that would be really great.

[Josée Bégin]

I'll see what we can do in terms of sectors.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you. I appreciate it.

On a separate question—I'm always curious about this—under the national occupational classification, NOC, various jobs are grouped into certain categories and are ranked accordingly as high-skill or low-skill.

Can you explain a little bit how that works? I'm perplexed. How do you decide that a medical assistant is high-skilled and a dental assistant is low-skilled?