Mr. Speaker, I move that the seventh report of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, presented on Wednesday, March 11, be concurred in.
I will be sharing my time.
We in the opposition have been persistently fighting for the government and for Parliament to confront the metastasizing youth unemployment crisis. Youth unemployment has continued to grow in this country, and many young people are losing hope that they will be able to get a job that allows them to afford a home and to provide for themselves and their family. We have been working hard to present constructive proposals that would give young people jobs, homes and hope.
How do we address the youth unemployment crisis? Conservatives put forward a plan in the fall that has a number of key points in it: unleashing the economy; addressing the regulatory and taxation barriers that make it harder to start and grow a business in this country; fixing immigration, addressing the significant problems in the immigration system that have grown up under this government; fixing training; and building homes where the jobs are.
Today we are putting forward a motion that focuses specifically on the issue of training, because at a time when there is very high youth unemployment, there are also critical shortages in certain occupations. We have not attended enough in the last 10 years to the need to train Canadian young people for the jobs that exist in this country. Businesses struggle to find people who can fill certain skill gaps. Meanwhile, many young people remain unemployed, so we need policies that zero in on this need to fix training, to train young people for the jobs that exist.
One of the problems in this regard has been what we have been calling profession prejudice, the idea that there are certain good jobs in this country, jobs that are in demand and that pay well and provide good opportunities, that are nonetheless scorned by certain elites for kind of prejudicial reasons. There are certain careers that, sadly, for too long, people in elite positions of power have for whatever reason considered less important or less valuable. Paradoxically, some of these are careers where a person can earn much more than in the kinds of careers that are more highly esteemed by elites.
Conservatives have been challenging this idea of profession prejudice, highlighting the fact that all work has dignity, that the dignity of the work comes from the human dignity of the person who is doing that work, and encouraging young people to look past the elite-driven profession prejudice that sometimes gets in the way of people choosing careers that they would actually like and that actually fit with the needs of the place they are in and of the country as a whole.
As we have been making this case, we have been deeply disappointed to see in the last Liberal budget a policy that actually makes matters worse, a policy that I think reflects profession prejudice on the part of the government and that will widen the gap between the jobs that require Canadian young people and the training people are actually receiving. This policy was on page 217 of the last federal budget. The policy says that students studying at private, for-profit institutions would no longer be eligible for student grants.
The policy going forward is to completely cut these students off from student grants, to say that if they do any studies at a university, no matter how job-relevant they are or are not, they can get a student grant, but if someone studies at a vocational institution, they will not have access to student grants. Vocational institutions in this country are generally organized as private, for-profit institutions. It is a distinction that is not based on the labour market relevance of the qualifications. It is a distinction that is based solely on the ideological filter that the government brings, which I think is rooted in professional prejudice.
I think the important thing to understand is that this debate is not about whether people like the model of private, for-profit; private, not-for-profit; or public institutions at the post-secondary level. It just happens that within our system, there are certain kinds of careers for which the training is available at a certain kind of institution. If someone wants to study philosophy, as I did, they are are not going to find that at a private, for-profit institution. Likely they are going to find it at a university. However, if someone is going to study traditional Chinese medicine or study massage, they are likely not going to find those qualifications available at a university. They are going to have to choose to study at a vocational institution.
That is how our system is structured. The government might not like that, but the way the system works is that private vocational institutions are offering all kinds of skills training that is simply not available in the public system. In some cases, there are programs available in both public institutions and private institutions, but there is not sufficient capacity in the public institutions to address the need, so the difference is made up in private institutions.
An example we heard about at committee is dental hygienists. There is a real demand for dental hygienists in this country. It is a good career, an in-demand career and a career that we need to be training Canadian young people for. Some students study at public institutions, but most who take the exam and who go on to pursue this career are coming out of the path of private institutions.
For the government to say to these students, who are trying to get the qualifications to fill in-demand careers, that they are no longer eligible for student grants is completely unfair to them. It is unfair to discriminate in this way. It also has the effect of steering young people toward career paths that do not actually align with the needs of the labour market.
The message to young people is that if they study very practical vocational skills, no grants will be available to them, but that if they study a general undergraduate degree, grants are available to them. This message creates an incentive structure that pushes young people who are making these decisions at the margin to consider a career that leads them to access student grants, yes, but may not or does not actually align with the needs of the labour market.
We have really tried to understand why the government is doing this. Why is it cutting off students at vocational institutions from getting student grants? We have not received any clear or credible explanation, except that the minister said at one time that they think public dollars should follow public institutions. I am sorry, but the government is not planning to offer these kinds of programs at public institutions. If there is not going to be a worsening of existing shortages in the skilled trades for certain health care professions and in various other areas, then those grants need to remain in place, and we need to further valorize and affirm the value of these careers.
The only explanation I can think of for the actions of the government is that it comes out of an elitist ivory tower preferencing of certain kinds of professions over others: profession prejudice.
As we have tried to challenge this issue, we put forward a motion that actually received unanimous support at the human resources committee to ask the government to reconsider this policy. This was a big step, and I congratulate the Liberal members of the human resources committee for joining with Conservatives and the Bloc to unanimously pass the motion asking the government to reconsider this bad policy. I hope they will stand by the votes they made at committee and vote for the concurrence motion.
I also want to recognize that before he crossed the floor, the member for Markham—Unionville was a big part of the effort to challenge this policy. He helped organize events within the Chinese community with me, calling the policy discriminatory. He pointed out that the Chinese community is particularly disadvantaged by it because the traditional Chinese medicine programs that many rely on are not offered at public institutions. I hope the member for Markham—Unionville will stand by the activism he did. I want to thank him for working with me at that time, and I want to encourage him to stand by what he did and what he said at the time, and to vote for the motion.
Finally, I want to highlight the fact that Conservatives proposed policy to actually go in the opposite direction. That is, we proposed policy that student grants should magnify the needs of the labour market, that we should offer relatively more generous grants to students studying for in-demand careers. That would have made sense, rather than the profession prejudice, the discriminatory policies, of the government, to quote the member for Markham—Unionville.
The motion provides the government with the opportunity to do the right thing: to vote with us and to vote with their members on the human resources committee to reverse the policy. We are going to have a vote on this today. Liberal members seated here and elsewhere have a chance to do the right thing: to vote with us to call on their government to reverse this policy so we can get back to training Canadian young people for the Canadian jobs that exist and so we can address the gaps that exist.