Industry Committee on May 6th, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much. Your time is up.

Mrs. Gray, you now have the floor for five minutes.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to go first to Mr. Kurland.

I wanted to ask you about the streamlining of skilled workers and their international accreditation recognition. We know there are a lot of skilled workers who either want to come to Canada or are here in Canada and want to work in their field.

Is this something that everyone within your field agrees needs to be done where there's a way of streamlining those processes? What are those barriers? What are the delays that you're hearing and seeing?

[Richard Kurland]

Barriers are local, like politics. It is possible, based on particular occupations, to have a skill set that is regulated in the home country of the applicant that will be accepted in Canada. Some things require local expertise. Most things do not, such as carpentry, electricians and health care professionals.

What Canada is doing well is eliminating the interprovincial problems for accreditation, and then we upgrade to eliminating the international barriers. We're on that road. It is being done. What we need are like-minded countries—like New Zealand and Australia, to name two—to allow for a labour pool in those countries that will have access to employment in all those countries with less red tape.

In terms of processing times, it's the same old problem. We just have to nail it down and have advance accreditation.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you very much.

One other question just quickly here is with respect to international students. We hear that we have a lot here taking post-secondary education and either their work visas are restrictive or they expire. Then also with International Experience Canada work visas, they're expiring and the people are here.

Based on your experience, is that an area where, again, there could be some streamlining and maybe some extensions to help with this labour crisis we're having in Canada?

[Richard Kurland]

A COVID lesson is that we can do this. We had a minister who made the executive decision to engage mass extensions of status sent by email to particular individuals. That's the way to do it.

Why not do it? It's enforcement, the danger of someone committing a bad act in Canada and the political responsibility that goes with it. I think you're absolutely right. It is a lesson learned, and we should be going down that path of mass extensions electronically delivered, particularly now and particularly for students.

One fast point is that it's the foreign student who is the mortgage helper for families across this land. It's the foreign student who contributes to the local economies, these small and medium-sized businesses, and works in places like restaurants. They are our future pool of human capital. We have to take better care of them.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you.

I want to go back to Restaurants Canada. I want to ask about the CDAP, the Canada digital adoption program, which has to do with having small businesses upgrade their digital services.

For Restaurants Canada, can you comment? Is this something you're hearing from your members? Is this something that's useful? Are there a lot of people utilizing this? It's a massive program. It's $4 billion. I'm just wondering if you're getting feedback from your restaurants that they're utilizing this or if there are any issues you're hearing about it.

[Lauren van den Berg]

The truth is that it's almost irrelevant to our sector, to our members. We don't have the bandwidth or the capacity to even investigate the program and its potential utilities. Any restaurateur, frankly, who has survived to this point is already online. They know how to use the Internet. They have mobile apps. They have been working with third party deliveries, which often come at the cost of an arm and half a leg. They've lasted here because they've been able to pivot and innovate when it comes to investing in technologies. This program hasn't really been something that has been most relevant for the food service sector.

There are probably other smaller businesses, the really small up-and-coming ones that maybe were going to start opening up in March 2020 and didn't have an online presence. Maybe it would be better suited for them. The reality is that most restaurant operators already knew their way around the Internet.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much, Mrs. Gray. That's all the time we had.

We'll go to Mr. Fillmore for our last round of questions.

You have five minutes.

[Andy Fillmore, Liberal, Halifax, NS]

Thank you, Chair.

Thanks to all the witnesses today. I very much appreciate the testimony and time.

I have been having a great time with this document. Thank you for this. This is the CCI's talent and skills strategy. I hope that my fellow committee members will dive into it like I did. I really fell into it. I needed some popcorn to go with this. Thank you for this important work.

I think the big aha moment for me in it was this notion that talent creation instead of job creation is the watchword as we try to build and grow our innovation economy here in Canada. That was one of those moments when you change your thinking, so thank you for changing my thinking on this. I appreciate that very much.

You acknowledge in it that government can't solve all the problems. For example, it's really clear that Canadian companies need to pay competitive wages to make things better, but we can do some things. The onus is on us to do some of the things you've suggested, I think.

I note this notion of piloting a high-tech visa, and that's fascinating. I note this idea about recognizing foreign credentials at a better clip. That's fascinating. It involves work with all kinds of different organizations, the colleges of physicians and surgeons, and others, to make that work better. More co-op placements are really good.

The thing I want to land on, and the questions are for Ms. Bednar and Ms. Hearn, is around the digital nomad strategy.

I want to get to you, but to paint the picture for my colleagues, I have a friend who is a start-up founder. She lives with her laptop in the U.K. She goes to Spain, travels with her laptop and does all kinds of things. About a month ago she got back to the U.K. to continue working in her Airbnb to start her company, but she was stopped by England's border services' saying, “What are you doing working here? You don't have a visa. We don't know that you're going to leave.” Canada's not alone in having an outmoded immigration system that doesn't allow for digital nomads.

I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about what a digital nomad strategy would be in Canada.

[Vass Bednar]

I note that Dana O'Born, the vice-president of strategy and advocacy for CCI, wasn't able to connect tech-wise, but she'll be back to this committee. I don't want to speak for her or them, but I would very quickly say that both Denise and I support policies that help support worker mobility.

We've seen, provincially, the recent banning of non-competes in Ontario. This would be a pro-competitive policy if Canada were able to continue to demonstrate more leadership on this creativity. We heard about creativity and innovation earlier from Richard. Absolutely, this is an example of a pro-competitive policy intervention that is helping and is good for Canada, and again, falls outside of the Competition Act.

This is why, once again, we point to that opportunity and need for an all-of-government approach that takes the pressure off one ministry and shares it across orders of government and across government to keep that competition lens front and centre no matter what.

[Andy Fillmore, Liberal, Halifax, NS]

Okay.

Do you have anything to add, Ms. Hearn?

[Denise Hearn]

I'm not an immigration expert, but the only thing I would add is that we've seen some promising starts with the province recognizing Red Seal trades and allowing for greater mobility across the country. We think that these are really promising in terms of expanding the ability of workers to move, as Vass has mentioned. We think there's an increased opportunity to look at other trades this way and to perhaps limit the difficulty of occupational licensing, especially provincially.

That's all that I would add. Thank you.

[Andy Fillmore, Liberal, Halifax, NS]

All right. I will switch, then, to your area of expertise.

You called them “gatekeepers”, and you have your own definition, which I appreciate is very different from another current one.

We have increasingly very large companies with monopolies, as you discussed, that are making historic profits and are more and more wiping out smaller competitors, smaller companies. What would you like to tell this committee about what government can do to help that situation?

[Denise Hearn]

I am Canadian by birth, so that's why I'm so thrilled to be able to add my voice to this conversation in Canada.

What we've seen in the U.S., where I'm currently based, is Biden's recent executive order in July of last year that really took this all-of-government approach. He tasked different agencies—the Department of Defense, Health and Human Services, the Department of Agriculture and others—to really take a critical look at how anti-competitive behaviour was affecting their industry and to report back on that. Many of them did report back, yet the DOD said that this is actually a national security issue when you have many instances of single-source providers [Technical difficulty—Editor] and on and on it goes. Treasury came back with how this was affecting labour.

I think this isn't something that should be limited to the Competition Bureau. This needs to be something that Canada sees as fundamental to its future prospects of innovation. Canada continues to be ranked very low by the Conference Board of Canada in terms of our innovation prospects. We've had declining growth rates and entrepreneurship rates for a long time, and the OECD says one of the primary reasons is that we have an above-average use of antitrust exemptions that favour incumbents. This isn't something that is just a matter of supporting Main Street. It's a matter of Canada's future economic prospects, so it needs to be taken seriously across the whole of government.

That would be the thing that we'd like to leave everyone with today.

[Andy Fillmore, Liberal, Halifax, NS]

Okay. Thank you for that.

I have just a five-second question for Vass.

Vass, can you share the name of the artist of the work behind you? It's absolutely fascinating.

[Vass Bednar]

It's Jack Bishop, and he's a Canadian from out east.

[Andy Fillmore, Liberal, Halifax, NS]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you so much. I was hoping for a real five-second question and a real five-second answer.

Thank you, Ms. Bednar and Mr. Fillmore.

I want to thank everyone who took part in the meeting this afternoon. It was very interesting. On behalf of all the members of the committee, I want to thank you for taking the time to share your knowledge with us.

I also want to thank the honourable members, the clerk, the analysts, the interpreters and the technical support staff. I wish you all a very good weekend.

The meeting is adjourned.