Finance committee  That's right, so this person has to have a boom truck operator licence and a heavy crane operator licence to teach that to other students. Through our membership, we're seeking and grabbing those people and putting them in. Your bank teller example in Harlem, there would be an apprenticeship program for those bank tellers.

Finance committee  I'm working on a live example right now. NAIT is trying to deliver a crane operator course at their facility. I can't remember if it's at Fort Mac or Edmonton. They've come to us and asked if we had a current operator, someone who's working in industry who would be willing to be an instructor, because they have an instructor need over the next two years.

Finance committee  We have to have provincial governments that want to do it. They have to decide to do it and they have to execute it. They receive, through education transfers from the federal government, in the tens of billions of dollars, not only for post-secondary but also for primary education.

Finance committee  Those 16 year olds who are working for the HVAC company in Stuttgart get paid two days a week. So they're not.... They're paid by the company and assisted by the state, so it's a relationship that exists. Unpaid internships aren't the way to go in Canada. We need to get more people involved in the active economy.

Finance committee  There are buzzwords around about parity of esteem around various careers, etc., but at the end of the day, we need help promoting that these are valuable occupations. The people I represent make twice as much as I do. We have to get the word out. We have to do a better job and industry has to do a better job as well, the big construction companies, the big energy companies, saying your future probably isn't typing at a keyboard, but it's welding a pipe, reading a blueprint, or being an operation engineer at an oil sands facility or at a nuclear plant.

Finance committee  What they do to alleviate that concern or that stress on the system is that they have re-evaluations every couple of years. So if you're moving through and you find it's not of interest to you, you can switch to the other stream. So you can go from the vocational back to the academic, and your vocational experience—or your academic experience if you're on this side—works towards your certification on the other side.

Finance committee  You're talking about encouraging employers to hire apprentices. You missed it, I know, but what I said in my opening remarks is that's what we need to do more of. Be it a wage subsidy—it's a bad lingo in this town—be it some sort of incentive for the learner, we need to incent the system: trainers, employers, and the learners.

Finance committee  If I may interject again, the gentleman from the CFIB came with us on the study tour and his pitch was that small employers can't afford to train. They're afraid to train because of poaching and that kind of thing. I think this is a perfect example of how that doesn't have to be the case.

Finance committee  The proof will be in the pudding if the Merit Contractors Association and the Progressive Contractors Association of Canada work with the building trades to train people in a non-partisan way and if they'll work with us and let us train their people through the Canada job grant.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  No, we don't.

Finance committee  Everybody sits at a table like this in Stuttgart, in Dusseldorf, or in Berlin, and they decide what's going to happen in industry. It doesn't matter what your political leanings are; it's about the economy.

Finance committee  When I went to high school, maybe sooner than some of the other people around here—I guess I can say that without getting things thrown at me—I went to high school in Oakville, southwestern Ontario. There was nothing in the high school in terms of shop class or construction or anything so there was no exposure to it.

Finance committee  Well, I was talking about the link to training. Let's take HVAC, for instance, the heating, ventilation, and air cooling industry. There would be a pool of 50 or 60 companies in the local market, in the Stuttgart area, say, and they would work with the community colleges, which would deliver this training, paid for by the state, by Germany.

Finance committee  For a long time, apprentices in construction were not eligible for the Canada student loan program because of the short duration of the training. Generally to get a Canada student loan you had to have a 16- or 18-week training program to qualify. Now there's no length of time, so you could be on a four-, six-, or eight-week training stint for your B-ticket welding, and you're eligible to write off that community college cost or apply for a Canada student loan.