Human Resources committee  I don't know why you can't. I'm sure you could do that. It's a matter of organization and being able to put the right parties together in order to do it.

Human Resources committee  It's a good question, but just from my own experience, money pretty much drives everything. If you start at the top.... I was at a meeting just last week with people from Alberta—from Suncor, Shell, and another one; I don't think it was CNRL, but it was another huge oil sands developer.

Human Resources committee  It will happen. As to how the federal government influences that, I really don't have an answer for you. We do it because we recognize the necessity of it. One of our biggest selling points is that we do have qualified people who are ready to go to work, who are safety-trained, who know the latest technologies.

Human Resources committee  Can I just comment on that briefly? I believe you mentioned the Six Nations. With Six Nations' cooperation, we did a program through the Hamilton and Brantford building trades. It was modelled after the Hammer Heads program because we recognized what a great concept it was. We went to the Six Nations and asked them if they had somebody who could work with us, somebody from their youth employment agency that they had set up there.

Human Resources committee  The bottom line is that is that the unions tend to be more organized and more coordinated. It's easy for me to call up James or Steve and say, “Look, how about if we get together and do this program?” I don't know that there's that kind of a network—

Human Resources committee  I can give you real-life examples. The joint apprenticeship committee that I used to sit on—in a former life I was a business manager for the Hamilton local for electricians—we had approximately 280 apprentices, and we had that problem with getting apprentices to go to school, because of their economic problems and whatnot, so we went with Mohawk College and with our representatives from the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities and asked if we could set this up somehow for night school for, say, two nights a week.

Human Resources committee  Again, it's about support. There are a lot of things that come into play. When somebody gets started in our trade, the word on the street is if you become a union apprentice in the electrical trade, there's a very good wage to be had at the end of it all, with benefits and pensions and some security.

Human Resources committee  I can say really quickly that happily, I haven't had to collect unemployment insurance for quite a while, but I can remember when I went to trade school, and you're exactly right. Half the time you were there for eight weeks—and for us, sometimes it was ten weeks—and you finally got your unemployment insurance at about week nine.

Human Resources committee  Thank you for this opportunity to share our experience and our views on the important topic of apprenticeship. We welcome the standing committee's interest in this issue and look forward to the publication of your report. My name is John Grimshaw. I am the executive secretary-treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Construction Council of Ontario.