Industry Committee on April 20th, 2021

[Robert Donald]

Thank you, Mr. Masse.

In terms of your first question about training in the workforce, as I say, we have such limited capacity in our country and so few facilities. People from northern Quebec, for example, have to move for three years to Quebec City to do their training, and they don't do it.

AAR is a company in Windsor. It has to hire people off the street. It's the largest private maintenance, repair and overhaul company in North America. It has to hire people off the street because there are no colleges locally.

They need help and, bluntly, we're working with them.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Just so you know, we do have a college just two kilometres from there, St. Clair College. They were supposed to be part of the original group to actually create a training program, but it fell apart with the Harper administration and other things happening. So, there was that. It, literally, is two kilometres from that site.

[Robert Donald]

However, it's not teaching aviation programs.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

No, but it was announced with the Harper administration that it would do those things. It never followed through. It wanted the government to pay for all of it. The government paid for part of it, and then it fell apart.

[Robert Donald]

It remains that they are hiring people off the street because they can't convince people to move from Mississauga, and they can't hire locally with the skills coming out of local colleges.

Those types of programs need to be supported. There is no equivalent today, other than a paper-based, distant correspondence course. Those are the types of programs we need to put in place.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Donald.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you very much.

Our next round of questions goes to MP Poilievre.

You have five minutes.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Donald, we bring 300,000 immigrants to Canada every year. On average, they tend to be more educated than the Canadian-born population. They're more likely to have masters and Ph.D. degrees. However, they're less likely to work in the fields for which they were trained.

We also have veterans who leave the armed forces with immense skills but not licensed qualifications. They do all kinds of trades work on military equipment, and then they don't have, for example, licensing to do work as mechanics or other tradespeople.

Finally, we have other people who pick up skills throughout their lives that are very real. Farm kids are the best possible example. They learn how to work on all kinds of equipment. They're obviously qualified. They use these extremely complicated mechanical apparatuses on their farms. However, if they ever leave the farm and try to get into these trades, they're not licensed.

The licensing in this country is based on, as you say, hours and hoop-jumping rather than on what people can actually do.

I'll give you the example of a constituent of mine. He came here to work as a heart surgeon. He'd been doing heart surgeries in Singapore, a country that's more advanced than Canada. He got licensed by the college of physicians, but guess what? Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada wouldn't give him a work permit because they had not independently done a forensic analysis of his life. The college of physicians thought he was qualified. The Singaporeans thought he was qualified. I might add that the human heart in Singapore is biologically the same as the heart here in Canada. They almost stripped him of his work permit, and he was ready to go home because, frankly, he can get a job anywhere in the world. Thank God we intervened and got him his practice back. There are probably hundreds of Ottawa residents whose lives have been saved by him since.

What do you suggest we do across the entire system to remove this bureaucratic gatekeeping that prevents people who can demonstrate they have the skill set to do the job from getting licensed to do it?

[Robert Donald]

Thank you, Mr. Poilievre.

I agree with you. It is a travesty that we have these dramatic skill shortages that are preventing Canadian companies from being competitive, causing them to turn away work because we don't have the workforce to do it.

All of those examples that you gave of foreign workers who are licensed in their home jurisdictions in our industry and come here.... Ninety-nine per cent of those requests are refused by Transport Canada, as I alluded to earlier. It's not because of lack of competence but because they didn't study the same academic program.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

They can do all the same things.

[Robert Donald]

Absolutely. They've been doing it for 20 years on Air Canada aircraft.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

I'm sorry to interrupt. Let me be clear here. They've been working on Air Canada aircraft in other places, at landing stations in, for example, Germany, but then they come here and can't work on the very same aircraft that they were working on abroad. Do I understand you correctly?

[Robert Donald]

That's correct.

You've got it exactly.

That's exactly right, and because they didn't study, for example, cloth wings back in Berlin, now they have to do a gap training on cloth wings, but they can't do that, just that little piece, at a Canadian college. Colleges aren't set up for that, so they have to go back for two years to study, and they can't afford to do that: to quit their job and go back to school for two years.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

They come here with this extremely valuable brain—

[Robert Donald]

Yes, sir.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

—that is worth probably millions of dollars to our economy, but they're banned from using it.

[Robert Donald]

That's correct.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Wow. That is again an example of this gatekeeper economy we've built in this country, where we prevent people from contributing and succeeding. Think of all the tax revenues they could be paying if their incomes were what they are worth, what they should be paid. Think of all of the jobs we would have, and think of all the services our economy could enjoy if we did what you're suggesting, which is to judge people based on what they can do.

[Robert Donald]

It's competency assessment, not following a checklist in a book. Those tools exist for competency assessment in our industry. The University of Waterloo is doing some great things. We have some competency assessment tools, but we need to move to that and move away from hours-based training in our colleges to providing industry with the tools, and if they have the foreign workforce and the military, as you alluded to—

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

We know how to do it.

[Robert Donald]

Yes. It will increase our competitiveness.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

British Columbia's top trade school did an attempt at this, where they gave course credits to soldiers based on the skill sets those soldiers had already developed.

I'll wrap up on that point, Madam Chair. Our trade schools know how to do this. Let's get busy, recognize skills, get people to work and get the gatekeepers out of the way.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you very much, MP Poilievre.

We'll go now to MP Jowhari.

You have five minutes.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, witnesses, for your testimony today.

Mr. Balsillie, it's good to have you back at our committee, sir.

You've mentioned a number of times that Canada is first world in its input but third world in its outcome. If I understood you correctly, you said that the role of government needs to change and that there are other governments that have been ahead of us over the last 25 years, yet you've said that it's not too late. It can be fixed and it can be changed. Can you expand on what needs to change and how we can fix it, if indeed that's the issue?

[Jim Balsillie]

Sure.

We had an orthodoxy of extreme market fundamentalism in Canada that everything's hands off, and the ideas economy, by definition, is hands on, all day and every day—full contact. Once we understand that's the role of government—and not cutting red tape or bringing incentives to foreign companies, etc., but in fact shrewd red tape, if you want to call it that—then that's what you need to do.

It's technical. These countries do it in a very coordinated fashion. I could go into considerable depth, but I obviously don't have time, about how they do it. Each country is attuned to its own approaches. That's why there is the idea of an economic council that is a centralized place for managing these crosscutting complex issues, so that we don't invent the ebola vaccine and transfer it to the U.S. for $200,000, where a company promptly sells it four days later for $50 million, which is a building block for a vaccine for COVID and so.... That wouldn't happen if you had the expertise and an integrated approach. Now this—