Human Resources committee  I could make a couple of comments. While there has been progress for women in moving into skilled trades and apprenticeships, we still see fairly low rates. I think there's a parallel to what we looked at in our study in terms of immigrants, whether they be male or female, from non-traditional source countries and attitudes towards doing an apprenticeship.

Human Resources committee  It's a good question. Off the top of my head, I don't believe the father's place of birth is in the short form; I believe it's in the long form. Earnings are in the long form. Occupation, we control for; it's in the long form. I'd have to check on the other variables, but I'm quite sure that we could not do our analysis with the short form.

Human Resources committee  It's going to be a challenge for future research. The main issue is in the past, when the long form was mandatory. We were fairly confident that we were getting a representative sample of the population and for these subgroups. Obviously, if individuals are refusing to complete the long form, and if that's not random, then we're going to have to try to account for that statistical bias, or any statistical biases that could come into it.

Human Resources committee  I guess one way to think about it is that it's reflecting the underlying preferences we all have for certain lifestyles, in a sense the non-pecuniary aspects of educational pathways. Any kind of model that's trying to predict demand going forward—these kinds of effects could be modelled into simulations.

Human Resources committee  I don't really have a lot to add. In general, we know that often access to credit is a major issue for people in educational programs. I'm not saying that's a big issue for apprenticeship, but a detailed look at what potential barriers there are for people might be something worth considering, and whether individuals feel they're giving up something by entering into the apprenticeship program.

Human Resources committee  I'll make a quick comment related to the first nations question. We did a separate control, in a fairly basic way, in our analysis among Canadian-born first nations men and women. Within the context of our overall statistical analysis, there are many controls. For first nations men, we're finding a 13% to 16% lower probability of completing an apprenticeship, after we control for family background and parental education.

Human Resources committee  Thank you. I'm going to talk a bit about the main results from a paper I completed with Ted McDonald, who is an economist at the University of New Brunswick. It was part of a major project done by the Canadian Labour Market and Skills Researcher Network funded by the federal government.