:
I call the meeting to order. I see everyone is here.
We will have each of you present, and there will be questions and answers afterward.
Before I start, I want to alert the committee to a couple of points. One is that we would appreciate receiving suggestions for witnesses from you for our future study by the end of Thursday of this week.
I'd also like to inform you—and there will be a notice going out a little later today—that department officials will be appearing before the committee on Thursday with respect to Mr. Cleary's motion as amended, so keep that in mind.
With that, we will start with our presentations in this first panel. I'm not sure who will present first.
We have Mr. Kent MacDonald, president, from Algonquin College, if you're ready to go. Then we have Mr. David Corson, president of the Algonquin Students' Association. We'll conclude with Brigadier-General Gregory Matte from Helmets to Hardhats.
We'll start with Mr. Kent MacDonald. Go ahead.
:
Thank you very much for the opportunity to share some of my thoughts with the group. This is certainly an important and timely topic for the Canadian college and polytechnic group. This topic is new, and not just for Canada: we're seeing it in the Richard report in the U.K. and we're seeing it in various states in the United States, so it is timely.
I also had an opportunity to review some of the comments made by previous speakers, so I've decided not to simply repeat those comments. When we look at this very topic, we can look at a number of tactical initiatives that I think governments should be considering, including tax incentives for employers, interprovincial mobility for students, apprenticeship enhancement, grants, and others, yet I would say that most of the answers that you're seeking are probably already available to this committee in other publications, including the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum and the Canadian Council of Directors of Apprenticeship.
To prevent some level of redundancy, what I thought I would do is take it to 10,000 feet from a president's perspective. Maybe that could be of some use to the committee.
Certainly, as a lifelong educator and now the president of a college, the question that I put before our faculty, staff, and industry partners whenever I have the opportunity to speak with them is, what does it truly mean to be educated in the 21st century?
The concept of apprenticeship goes back to medieval times, of course, and I think it's time for us to do a complete rethink on how we're doing that education. Depending on how we define apprenticeship, I would also suggest that for the people in this audience, be they educators, lawyers, orthopedic surgeons, or others, you too have had an opportunity for some level of apprenticeship as it has been defined.
I'll limit my comments to four quick points.
Number one is that last summer Bill Bradley, an impressive American senator, described in his book We Can All Do Better how there was a time in North America when we could use the analogy of an elevator. We could get on the elevator regardless of where we were in our social status in our communities, and if we worked hard enough and we got a few breaks, we could get off the elevator on maybe the second floor or the third floor, and if we were on the second or third floor, maybe we could get off on the fifth. He would argue that the elevator is broken in this country and in America, and that the one way we can ensure that people still have that social mobility is to find ways to educate more people, to democratize post-secondary education for more people.
However, I would suggest that in this country there is a myth around what it is that we're doing in higher education. I know that it's a provincial jurisdiction, but we need to have a deeper, richer conversation about what impacts higher education can have.
As I look around this room at the demographic, we could probably all think back to the 1970s and 1960s, when a hands-on, applied, trade-oriented education was one that was valued in our community. Somewhere through the 1980s and the 1990s, we started to give less value and less honour to that type of work. The challenge we have before us today as Canadians is to determine how we can bring honour and respect back into that level of work, as opposed to simply graduating with a credential and an education. I would suggest that a number of institutions, in particular those similar to Algonquin College, can play a significant role in that process.
I remember growing up in what once was referred to by Maclean's magazine as the poorest and least desirable community in this country to live in: New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. I have the dichotomy of now living in Ottawa but coming from New Glasgow, so to the top-ranked city from the lowest in the country....
I'm convinced that further investment within higher education, particularly in the college sector, will be the path to allow more young people to get into education, yet the challenge we have before us is that an educator like me has spent typically no time on a college campus.
Typically, we have done well enough in high school. We go to university and have an excellent learning experience there, and we go off to teachers' college. Nowhere am I exposed to the opportunities of what a Canadian college does. We are not the same as the American community college system; in fact, there are only six colleges out of the 150-plus in this country that are actually referred to as community colleges.
The question that I think we need to explore is this: how are we going to more deeply influence the influencers—those who determine where their child or their sister or brother may be going? We know fundamentally that the key influencer still is the parent, followed by teachers and guidance counsellors.
I will leave the committee with five points in the time I've been given here.
Using the influence and the power afforded to all of you in your particular roles, we need to have a significant shift in the way we educate educators in this country. The 50 faculties of education need to look differently at how they are preparing their teachers. I would suggest having mandatory internships at a college sector somewhere across the country. There are over 900 campuses. It should be quite easy to do.
The second—other people have already addressed this significantly at the committee—is to eliminate barriers. Many, many barriers exist, and I've given just one example in the materials I have left with the clerk for you to read.
The third one is that we must, as Canadians, break the myth of what constitutes effective higher education today. I would recommend establishing some type of long-term commitment to break the social status that absolutely exists when we talk about colleges and universities in this country. That must start to occur at a very young age. We have broken the myth on smoking. We have broken it around drinking and driving. Today in the country we're celebrating that we can have a conversation around mental health. We need to start to have the conversation about what is effective higher education and start to ask young people what it is they want to do to ensure a positive career.
The fourth one is that we need to shift from measuring our success as educators in terms of how many people we put into the system and start to have a conversation about how many are graduating. There are simply too many people not completing. That includes mostly under-represented groups—people with disabilities, aboriginals, and first-generation types of students.
Finally, I would strongly encourage you to take the time to read—I've left one of these for each of you—even the first three chapters of this book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. I think you'll find it enlightening in terms of possibly having some type of shift on how we must all look at education and how we value work in our community today.
Thank you very much.
:
Good morning, members of the committee. My name is David Corson. I'm the president of the Algonquin Students' Association. I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today and to express to you the concerns shared by students and the challenges they have faced.
To start off, this is our mission statement:
The Algonquin Students' Association will “create an environment that inspires a passion for student success”. Our primary focus, therefore, is to integrate campus life with campus academics for success.
However, a student defines his own success.
Historically, at the turn of the previous century, there was a system whereby skilled trades had, as a key component of their advancement, a master piece which showed their competency. In completing the project, they were able to display their skills while gaining personal pride. Since then, for a variety of reasons, there have been substantial changes in the way skilled trades workers are trained in Canada. We believe in some cases this has been an aid in diluting their perceived value.
Since the 1980s societal impressions have devalued skilled trades. This situation has been perpetuated through various media streams. It has played a role in bringing us to a critical shortage of skilled tradespeople. The students' association strongly supports the objective of the awareness and perception study conducted by skilled trades and apprenticeships to turn the current negative perception of skilled trades to one that is more positive and eventually to reposition skilled trades to being a first-choice career option in the minds of Canadian youth and their influencers, such as parents and educators.
The situation for skilled trades has been further challenged by the timing of career choices being presented to students. We support the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum's suggestion that Canada needs to engage its youth in an evaluative process to identify their competencies and match these to the realities of the job market. Awareness efforts are critical. Our experience has been that students are starting as young as grade 5 to make these choices with educators.
We support another objective of the same study: to further encourage employers to create, expand, and sustain career opportunities in the skilled trades for young Canadians. We believe that doing this will also directly improve the percentage of youth who are aware of all of the career opportunities in the skilled trades. In this vein, we see an opportunity for the federal government to further invest in and promote the federal skilled trades program.
As a side note, Algonquin is sending a carpenter to Leipzig, Germany, to represent us in the carpentry skills competition for the world. We take pride in that, but who knows? Has anyone heard of that? This is our point.
Through the challenges at the local, provincial, national, and world stages, we see an amazing opportunity to help change the movie that is playing in society's mind to one that is more positive for the skilled trades. It may not be the Olympics, but maybe it could be.
One of the barriers that prospective apprentices currently face is the multiple layers of administrative bureaucracy. There are four levels.
First is the employer. Prospective apprentices may have challenges securing an employer to train them, and I'll speak on that closer to the end.
Second, colleges do not currently intake apprenticeship applicants. They do for everyone else, and this creates a disconnect when students are contacting the college about start dates.
Then provincially—and I can speak only for Ontario—the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities will consult with the student and issue the notification of offer to him or her, instead of the student dealing with a user-friendly Ontario College Application Service process, so we have a two-tiered system. Employment Ontario may also provide up to $1,500 of taxable financial support to apprentices who are not eligible to receive employment insurance benefits once they've applied during in-school training.
The fourth level of bureaucracy is federal. At the federal government level, funding goes through the traditional HRSDC process, where available—see the previous point—with inherent delays when we can already map the student’s prospective path through training.
One recommendation we would like you to consider is to streamline the services. A prospective apprentice with an employer should be able to use an OCAS-type system to apply for apprenticeship training in Ontario with the MTCU, using that provincial model as an example.
The results of this process should be communicated to both the college and the applicant to help form the training bond and also to trigger a connection with the federal government to determine potential funding sources. Two of the federal initiatives that we support as examples are the apprenticeship incentive grant, the AIG, and the apprenticeship completion grant, or ACG, and we see an opportunity for the government to increase funding for both of these initiatives.
Now that we have the prospective apprentice trained, there is a further barrier in the lack of transferability of skills from province to province. In the spirit of the Bologna Accord, we believe there should be national standards for apprentices, like the Red Seal for journeymen, which allow for some, if not all, transferability of skills and education.
Labour mobility has until recently been defined quite narrowly, focusing on mobility post-certification. As a result, the labour mobility and transferability of apprenticeship training are not well understood. These would be best clarified, in our opinion, at a national level.
In closing, we believe that the skilled trades are a key driver to the economic success of Canada. In the tough economic times that we are currently in, employers are facing difficult choices as to whether to keep current staff training or to risk training new apprentices. It can therefore be difficult for the prospective apprentice to secure an employer to sponsor him or her. We believe that the federal government has the capacity to provide incentives to remove this barrier and benefit all Canadians. This removal of barriers, along with the other examples provided in this presentation, will assist those at the front line to be more efficient and to create a system that is more effective and attractive for apprentices in Canada.
I thank you.
:
Mr. Chair and committee members, thank you, first of all for your interest in the Helmets to Hardhats Canada program and for your public and financial support—public in the sense that it was the Prime Minister of Canada who actually launched this program 13 months ago in Edmonton, Alberta, with the financial support of a grant of $150,000 through Veterans Affairs Canada.
I thought I'd take the time I have to give a little bit more context, to and explanation of, the program. Hopefully, that will assist you with the questions you may have thereafter.
This program is modelled after the program of the same name in the United States. It has been active for 10 years now. We've simply replicated a lot of their successes here in the constituency of Canada.
It took a number of years to get the program set up in Canada. The reason for that was the governance that we wanted to put in place. This is a not-for-profit organization. It's incorporated under the Canada Corporations Act with a board of governors and bylaws, and we have it set up in such a way that the people who are the stakeholders do not have a majority over the program itself; it's a group of people coming together, including governments at all levels—provincially and federally—and people from the private sector, as well as unions and associations, such that nobody has dominion.
The niche of this program is the fact that we're offering an opportunity for a great career in the building and construction industry to men and women who have served or are currently serving in the Canadian Forces, and it's not just the career opportunity: it's the fact that we offer them the opportunity to become trained, skilled, and licensed within the trades as well. The bottom line for us is that it's not about finding our vets a job; it's about finding our vets a career. We're going to help any one of those who have helped our country, including those who have been injured in the line of duty.
Canadian veterans face three challenges, really, when they leave the Canadian Forces and try to enter into a career in the civilian world.
The first one—and I might be an example of this—is that many people join the military when they are quite young. As a result, when it comes time for them to leave the military, they really do not have the experience of writing a resumé, nor have they actually gone through a difficult job interview. When they joined the military, it was a very receiving audience.
Second, it's very difficult for someone in the military to translate their skills and qualifications into civilian terms that an employer would recognize.
Third, and perhaps most important, is the fact that given the nature of the military culture and the brotherhood of war, it's actually quite difficult for men and women who have served their country in uniform to find a cultural organizational fit that works with them and for them.
The value proposition that I'm putting forward to industry on behalf of all veterans of Canada is as follows: you're talking about a cadre of individuals who are highly dependable, loyal, and flexible. How many people at one moment could be reconstructing a country like Haiti after an earthquake, the next month going off to the Khyber Pass of Afghanistan and dealing with the Taliban to bring freedom and security so that girls can go to school, and then, the following summer, go to deal with the flooding in Manitoba? For all their good work, we then bring them here to Ottawa to serve on staff.
These men and women have the ability to learn. They have the ability to learn because the Canadian Forces is a learning environment. They learn how to learn within a classroom environment and to do distance learning on their own, using computers and using simulators. More importantly, not only do they learn how to learn, but they learn how to teach. Most of the teaching we provide in the Canadian Forces is done by people in uniform. What better way to learn than to teach, and what better way to master it than to share that with others?
I think you would all agree with me that people in the military are team players. This is a valuable quality when you look at what we do here in Canada, particularly in the construction industry. Not only are these people good followers, but they're also great leaders. Furthermore, they're used to dealing in dynamic situations and to multi-tasking. They have all the qualities of leadership within the civilian context.
The Conservative government, I will say, has blessed the Canadian Forces with the reinvigoration of our capitalization of the military, but most people who have spent a number of years in the military have learned to become very resourceful, because we have to look after our equipment and make sure that it operates when we need it most.
Furthermore, despite the business we're in, we're actually very safety conscious, which obviously is important in the construction industry.
Finally, the men and women who have served their country are proven. They have a background that's well documented by their performance reports. They have background security checks, which are very important in certain sectors of the industry, and obviously they have met medical and physical standards.
The program itself is all about matching that talent to the need in the Canadian construction industry. We are a team of four, all former military, and bilingual. We have a very simple system that provides a website where veterans who are interested in being part of this program register along with companies, contractors, and unions that subscribe to the notions of this program. In that way, we now have a matchmaking opportunity. That said, given the transition challenges that military people face, we provide counselling to those individuals to help them with that difficult transition.
We have some challenges in the program, one of which is just getting visibility. Being here today is very helpful for the program.
We ensure priority placements so that veterans come first in line when it comes to apprenticeships within the unions. We deal with every person case by case, because when you're dealing with mental illness or physical disability, you have to understand the context of their circumstances and the few limitations they may have to make sure there's a good fit.
Mr. Chair, that concludes my opening remarks.
:
We can give you preliminary details. The website has been in place only since September 18. With the website we're now able to collect the statistics that you're referring to. As of today, probably upwards of 680 veterans have registered through the website.
The average age is all over the demographics. We have people who have retired from the military after their initial three-year contract, and those could be as young as 20 or 21 years old. We see an awful lot of people who are in their late 20s or early 30s, in part because of the situation with the military at the moment and in part because we have a number of people who are approaching a point in their lives at which it is time to make a transition.
What I mean by that, for instance, is that in the military people are eligible for a pension after 20 years of service. That has been changed in the last 10 years. That said, it's an important decision point for someone who has achieved 20 years of service. They now have guaranteed revenue that will allow them to facilitate a transition into a new career.
Then we have other folks who are at the end of their careers. They could be in their late 40s or early 50s. In fact, I was just talking to one fellow yesterday who's been retired for a number of years. He's in his late 50s. I won't give you his name, but he is on an apprenticeship out in Edmonton, having moved there from the province of Prince Edward Island.
:
I wouldn't have a quantifiable number, because I don't want to track that data in case our website is hacked. We know what happened with Veterans Affairs Canada a year and a half ago. I don't want that to happen with the website we have. We've taken extraordinary measures for security reasons.
That said, we limit the amount of information we collect. Every case has its own circumstances. If someone self-identifies to me as having a mental illness, I then explore that with them without going into great detail, because I'm not a medical doctor. I just want to know what triggers those problems, how they are managing them right now, and where they would be comfortable working.
I can give an analogy. We had an individual who was hired as a boilermaker. He had worked on the M777 howitzer over in one of the forward operating bases in Afghanistan. He had shell shock.
Boilers make a lot of noise. The tools that they work with are very heavy. He wanted to do that, but he was transparent with the union that he joined and with the people who were on his course about having that mental challenge. The first day there was a loud noise in the classroom, and of course he froze, but the people around him, first of all, respected his service, and second of all were aware of his limited challenge—and it's only a limited one—and they were highly empathetic. They helped him through that brief moment, and since then he's done very well. He's continued with his apprenticeship with great success.
All that is to say that we deal with every individual's circumstances on a case-by-case basis within their own unique construct.
:
That's a very thoughtful question. I thank you for asking it.
I really have four key audiences that I'm dealing with in the first year, and we're only about eight months into the first year since I've been part of the program.
The first audience, obviously, is the military community itself, but they're broken up into three groups: the regular force component, meaning those who are full-time; the reserves and all the different militia units across Canada from coast to coast to coast; and then the retired veterans.
The second community are the unions that are part of this program, the international unions, the AFL-CIO, and going to the local level and the union lodge level and dealing with the business manager—basically the guy or the woman in charge of that union—to make sure they fully understand the value proposition and are fully on board to make sure that these vets get priority placement.
The third group are the contractors and employers across Canada in the building and construction industry. We make them aware of this fantastic opportunity. Obviously there's workforce development embedded in what we're doing, but they get it.
Then finally it's dealing with the colleges and the provinces that are part of the apprenticeship approval process all across this great country. In that case, I am dealing with 13 constituencies.
Those are the four audiences that I'm trying to get visibility with.
In my view, these students are under the same pressures as other students. A number of barriers keep them from completing their studies.
The biggest one, I would say, is students being underprepared. It goes well beyond just being academically unprepared. If you look at who is going into these professions, you see that many of them are first generation, so they have never had a mother or father who has influenced them, and that's a real issue. They are underprepared financially, so they can't sustain their studies. They are underprepared socially, so when they go into these classrooms, they quite simply just don't feel as if that's where they should be. They should be out on the job site.
There's a plethora of research around student success and retention. At Algonquin we have tried to apply those same practices to our apprenticeship programs. We have seen a measurable increase in our programs; retention went from 62% to 64% over the last two years. The target of the Ontario government is 70%.
Therefore, it's getting to students at a younger age, ensuring they are academically prepared, and making sure they are wrapped with services. I could also say in the 1950s, 5% of us went to post-secondary education, and around the time of the Montreal Olympics it was about 20%. That number is now reaching 70%. Although we don't bell-curve, we clearly know that people are participating now who have never participated before, and with those students come a series of things that prevent them from being successful.
When we look at the academic nature of what we're doing, we also have to have a conversation around the required student support services, some of which the retired Brigadier-General mentioned, and about helping these students through to completion.
:
I think it's a very important question. I can only offer an answer in the context of this program here. I would say that for military people who commit to an apprenticeship, based on my knowledge of people in the military who have gone into the trades, the success rate is pretty well 100%.
There are economic factors that can dissuade them from continuing to completion. For instance, when they have to go back into the school for a period of four, six, or eight weeks, quite often there's a delay in employment insurance. For someone in their late 20s or early 30s who has a mortgage, car payments, or a spouse who may not be working and may have young children, that's a long time without revenue, and this becomes a barrier, so they accept the fact that with two years of training they can earn a certain amount, and they just carry on from there.
The other thing that's probably worth highlighting are the barriers to entry to apprenticeship. This is converse to your question, but it is nonetheless important, because it touches on the whole notion of workforce development.
I find it interesting that here in Canada, where we have such a requirement for skilled trades, we often look beyond Canada. At the same time, the companies that say they have a need do not necessarily contribute in an equal way to workforce development; in other words, they do not support apprenticeships. This in itself becomes a barrier to entry and can exacerbate the situation for someone who is one, two, three, four years into an apprenticeship and is suddenly laid off. This person may have to wait six months before the next gig that will allow him to complete the hours needed for a licence.
Thank you.
:
In my comments, I referred to the myth that exists in higher education, and it's real. There are many reports. This is not just a Canadian problem; it's an American and European problem. Individuals are underemployed there too.
Rick Miner talks about jobs without people and people without jobs. We have hundreds of thousands of employers who are looking for trained workers, yet we have hundreds of thousands of young people without the right skills. That's where we need to have a more honest conversation about how we're going to have young people understand what the purpose of higher education is.
In North America we have been debating the purpose of higher education for 400 years, since 1636, but when you speak to students and ask why they want to go to college or university, it's very clear: they want to go to gain the skills and knowledge to get a job. That's where we're falling short.
Right now up to 30% of students at Algonquin College have spent time in a university. It's good for us. I would describe many of our programs as graduate schools of the 21st century. We're getting these highly educated people coming back and needing to have skills to actually align with the workforce.
From a government point of view and the point of view of the taxpayers who underwrite most of that education, that's a multi-million-dollar issue in the country. We're having young people not only duplicate their courses, but the opportunity cost of having to do those courses over and over is a loss of human talent.
I would suggest, as I said earlier, getting to young people and having a different kind of conversation, and I would suggest from a college perspective that we continue to provide programs that are highly in line with industry sector needs.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to follow up with a military piece.
I think the former Chief of the Defence Staff was wise, and his team was wise, when he started to look at this disconnect between the excellent training that our military members have and not having civilian credentials.
Today if you go to Algonquin College, you will see men and women in uniform studying with us. The military have said these are the types of training that do not have to be delivered by the military but can be delivered by public institutions. These are things such as chef training, automotive training, GIS training.
We're preparing highly qualified people by using public infrastructure. At the same time, these students are graduating with civilian credentials. In our view it's a nice match. When they do leave the military, they will have a credential so that when people are looking at their curricula vitae, they'll be able to recognize that certification of previous learning.
:
Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here today to help us with our assignment of what the federal government might do to promote apprenticeship and streamline it.
Having been involved since I was elected in 2008 with many of the universities in Canada through our post-secondary education caucus and travelling around the country, I'm noticing that there is a shift going on, definitely a shift, from the silo thinking of universities and institutions to an opening up in understanding the skill sets graduates need as they leave their education, as they achieve their degree or their diploma.
I'm wondering in Algonquin's case, Mr. MacDonald, whether or not you are aligning it all with any other universities or post-secondary institutions to do things in a concurrent way to assess that there is value in an undergraduate liberal arts degree, which it seems our generation had put as paramount when we tell our kids, “Go get an education”.
In my case, my three kids had to go to a community college to do exactly what you said, which was to become employable. They had their liberal arts degrees, but they weren't employable.
The situation today is that I think post-secondary is recognizing this. I think they're getting it in some ways, perhaps not fast enough for some of us. They're facing a lot of barriers, particularly in their own faculties in academia, who don't philosophically agree with that direction. What are your experiences at Algonquin?
:
I'm going to speculate. Might this be a generational issue to have to work through, a culture that was established that removed tech programs from elementary education, that removed tech programs from high school? The high school I went to shut down the whole wing with all the trades training because the curriculum developers at the provincial level determined that we didn't need students who would be inclined to be in the trades to actually enter the trades. They wanted them to end up with a university liberal arts degree. Now you have those people who came through that culture—my generation, frankly—who believe that and think that.
I just want to make another point and have you close out with your comments on this.
You made a very perceptive observation. You said something that I think takes a little bit of bravery to say, something that I've thought for some time, and that is how we educate the educators.
In my generation, the easy way out, after our university degree, was to say to my roommates, “Well, what are you doing next year?”
“I don't know. What are you doing?”
“I don't know; we're graduating with liberal arts degrees. I'll just stay in school. I'll become a teacher.”
:
You've raised a number of points, several of which I hinted at earlier, and I only wish I had a little more time.
The book, which I hope you do read, gets at that. This is a phenomenon. How we value specific work has resonated into the cuts we've made in our district school boards, and that includes removing most trades-related training at an early age.
The irony in all of that, I would argue, is that the chance of that type of work being outsourced to other places around the world—be it the way we fix our cars or build our buildings or construct our roads and infrastructure—is not going to happen.
I'm a teacher. I've been a life-long educator, and it's a noble profession. In fact, Lee Iacocca said that in a rational world, the best of us would be educators and the rest of us would have to settle for something less.
That's the importance I put on it, but it does require us to think differently again as educators, to shift the conversation from what we're so focused on—what I'm teaching, what my curriculum is—as opposed to what the purpose of education is. When we can shift that conversation away from what I'm teaching to what the students are learning, we would start to grapple with things like the timeliness of how we put people through apprenticeship.
My very last comment, Mr. Chair, is that we have been encumbered by the idea that education needs to be time-placed and place-based. You can only reach a certain point when you sit there for 8 weeks or 15 weeks or four years, as opposed to looking at what has been learned in that time.
The idea of a student being able to demonstrate that they've learned the outcomes in eight weeks as opposed to three years would be a novel outcome. We're financed on how many students are in those seats for how long. It's not in our interest to get them out the door any faster.
Again, it's complex, and I wish I had more time.
Let me conclude with this: all of you hold an honorary role in this country. I've a very political mother in Nova Scotia. It was certainly an honour for me to share the fact that I was coming to meet with some of you today. Your work is important.
Thank you very much.
:
The commitment from the Government of Canada has ended. It was a $150,000 one-year grant. I'm just in the process of writing a letter to Minister Blaney to thank him for his contribution.
That said, the financial aspect is only one aspect of it. The profile that the Government of Canada has brought to this project is immeasurable. I know the Prime Minister is personally committed to this by the fact that he was the one who introduced this to the Canadian consciousness 13 months ago. I understand he will do this again in an upcoming event that I won't explain here in this forum.
That said, the Government of Canada has made its contribution. The Government in Alberta and Premier Redford, as well as Dalton McGuinty when he was Premier of Ontario, both committed a $150,000 one-time grant. We have another province on the cusp of making a contribution as well.
From private industry, TransCanada Pipelines has contributed $1 million that's sequenced over five years. It's $200,000 a year over five years. We have associations like the General Presidents' Maintenance Committee, which has also committed $800,000 sequenced over four years. We have individual international unions, which are the cornerstone of this project, like the boilermakers and the steamfitters and others, that have also contributed money to this project.
:
Excellent. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Kent, we have talked about the barriers, and I know that there are some bilateral agreements. We see the transferability of Red Seal once people are accredited at the Red Seal level. What's been consistent is everybody's concern around transferring apprenticeships and studying in one place and not having those credentials recognized in other places.
You've identified that there are some bilaterals. Newfoundland and Alberta have one in place. I believe there's one in place too with Nova Scotia. Where does that conversation take place? Is it between institutions? Do Algonquin and NAIT have that conversation? Is it at the provincial departments of labour? Is there a role for the federal government to play in bringing that conversation and allowing that conversation to take place?
That's the first question.
The other one is just off of what Phil was saying as well. The most successful entrepreneurs in Cape Breton are all tradesmen. They're electricians, carpenters, and even teamsters and mechanics who have gone on to have successful careers as entrepreneurs, and they really drive the economy in Cape Breton.
Is there a component within some of the trades to offer introduction to business as well, because many of the tradespeople go on to do business?
Those are two completely different questions, but I'll just throw them out.
:
The first one is a complex one.
We start with the employers bringing forward their need for the Red Seal. I think there are about 55 in the country now. We need that to occur, and then it spreads out through the governments and through the training institutions. There is some level of irony there, because it starts by defining the common outcomes that we want at a Red Seal level, but the further away we get from that decision as we roll it out through the provinces, the more the curriculum then begins to change.
I had a conversation with our coordinator and chair of apprentices. I asked what the implications would be if I came here today and said we wanted to increase Red Seal trades to 50% by 2015 or so, although I'm not doing that. He had real difficulty with it because of exactly the points that you're raising about having industry and governments and curriculum and institutions. Whereas apprenticeships used to be a bond between the apprentice and the employer, we have complicated that by adding a bond between the delivery agent and the government sectors as well. Having the four of those makes it more difficult.
According to the expert advice that I've received, there needs to be a conversation with the employer to get agreement there, and then it needs to be rolled out.
Could you just repeat your second question, Mr. Cuzner?
:
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, committee, for having us here today.
I won't take up a lot of time. As the chair has mentioned, I have been at the committee before, but just to give you a very quick overview of my role, I'm the CEO with Skills/Compétences Canada. We are an organization that promotes trades and technological education for young people across the country.
We do that through organizing experiential opportunities. One of our most popular is through a competition format that enables youth from across the country in up to 45 different occupational areas to test their skills against other youth from other parts of the country. We do that in a way that is very conducive for media, public, and students from surrounding schools to get a better appreciation of the complexity involved in skilled trades and technology careers.
In addition to that experience, which is focused on those students who are participating in the competitions, we offer Try-A-Trade and technology activities that allow students to try those occupations at a very basic level to get some understanding of what's involved with those occupations.
Today we have a number of apprentices and one journeyperson joining me. A couple of these people, Nathan and Kayla, have participated in our Skills Canada competitions in the past, so they can give you some perspective on what's involved with that. A couple of other apprentices who are currently going through the system are also here.
We're looking forward to the questions that you have for them.
:
I'll try to make this quick.
My name is Nathan Banke. I am a journeyperson as an automotive service technician—a car mechanic, if you will. I went through an apprenticeship system. I started off with the Ontario youth apprenticeship system. I did one of those early apprenticeships, and went through the rest of the apprenticeship system as a regular apprentice. I completed that and became a journeyperson in 2007.
During that time I competed in Skills Canada at various levels—provincially, nationally, and on a world scale. After that I continued working as a mechanic, but through Skills Canada I ended up working for another company. I met the owner of a different company, where we design and build training equipment for schools. In my current role, I'm the director of business development at a company that provides training equipment to schools across Canada, the United States, and around the world.
In the last three or four years I have travelled—driven and flown—across Canada. I have visited high schools and colleges in every single province—I haven't been to the Northwest Territories—and I've seen the apprenticeship systems in various provinces. I've sat on articulation committees for different provinces and for different apprenticeship systems. I have experience with the B.C. system, Alberta's, and a little bit in Quebec as well, where the company is based.
On a personal level, my brother has gone through an apprenticeship in the last couple of years. He just finished his licence this past year, and I have many friends who are still in apprenticeship to this day.
That is a little bit of information.
Thanks.
For me, this year is a perfect example. In my previous two years, at my first level it took about one month for me to receive EI benefits. Last year it was surprisingly quick. I was receiving benefits by about my third week in school. This year I still haven't received any benefits.
I got off the phone with EI this morning, actually, because I got a message saying they hadn't received my record of employment, even though I hand-delivered it on January 18.
I've heard other horror stories from other apprentices who told me they never received EI benefits at all during their level 2.
From the time you leave your employer to the time you start school, there is a huge gap or a huge waiting period until you receive your benefits. People have bills to pay. We're not allowed to work part time to supplement that, because we're supposed to be collecting EI benefits. If we're not collecting EI benefits or not receiving them, we have no money, so it's definitely a challenge.
:
Thank you very much, all of you, for being here. Congratulations for what you're doing. My daughters are 13 and 9, so I haven't had the conversation with them yet, but I certainly will be.
Mr. Rodger Cuzner: That was the one about the birds and the bees.
Mr. Brad Butt: I haven't had that one either, Rodger. I'm leaving that up to the wife. I'm not handling that one.
Voices: Oh, oh!
Mr. Brad Butt: One of the things that I find interesting about the whole apprenticeship thing is there seems to be what I would call two different types. We have people who are coming right out of high school and are getting into these programs, and then we also have what I would call second-career-type apprenticeships. In this type people who may have worked in a different field or who've been in an industry that is downsizing, because that's the way the market is going, are retraining through the apprenticeship program for a job that may be totally unrelated to what they were doing before.
Are any of you in that particular situation? You're all fairly young, so was this a career choice that you made right out of secondary school, or were you doing something else and then something drove you to decide that it wasn't going to work out or that you'd rather do something different, and now you've decided to enrol and participate in an apprenticeship program?
:
Before explaining my circumstances for that, I just want to say that in my job right now, a lot of times I've given presentations to college teachers. Next month I'm going to be presenting to about 50 college teachers. I'm talking to hundreds of college teachers throughout the course of the year, and everywhere I go, no matter where it is—Canada, the United States, any province, any city, any town—all the teachers I talk to are saying that the students they are getting lack the basic skills. If you go back five, 10, 15 years with these kids who are coming in, the guidance counsellors are pushing them in for typically the wrong reasons, but they're also lacking basic skills because our base-level culture has changed.
They don't have the father, the uncle, the aunt, the grandfather in the family, someone doing a manual trade, a skilled trade. Who cares what it is? If you've got uncle Tony working on a chimney duct or something, and you're there holding the hammer or holding something working with him, you get the base-level touch and feel of holding a screwdriver, a hammer, or whatever. A lot of these kids now are completely lacking that experience.
You can look at what is happening in the high schools. When they're taking away the high school shop programs or trades programs, you've got nothing. They don't know how to hold a screwdriver or a hammer. They don't know what a wrench is, and now the guidance counsellors are pushing the kids who aren't academic into a program and essentially babysitting them and trying to give them the base-level skills just to be able to function with tactile things with their hands. That's what I'm seeing across the country, in provinces all over the place and across the United States.
To get back to your first question, I was like Steve. When I was in high school, I asked myself if I wanted to go to university. Yes. Did I have any money? No. University was going cost a lot of money that I didn't have. Did I want to go to the military? Yes, but at 16 years of age I didn't want to make a commitment to do something like the Royal Military College in Kingston or join the services and make a long-term commitment. You cant make a decision like that at 16 years of age, or at least I couldn't.
For me it was to do some calculations, some basic math. If I went to university, I was going to end up four years later with a whole bunch of debt, even if I worked my ass off, or I could go into the apprenticeship system. At the time I could get into the Ontario youth apprenticeship system, which let you leave high school early, get a job, make money while working that job, and have those hours—say, 30 hours a week at a shop or whatever. You're making money, you're getting high school co-op credits, and you're getting apprenticeship hours. The government was paying for the level 1 apprenticeship. All of a sudden, financially it just made sense to do an apprenticeship.
At that time, there weren't the incentives they're giving out in Ontario right now. When my brother did his apprenticeship, he got the $1,000 at each level, and then the $2,000 at the end or whatever. I never had that, but the incentives are there. Going to school only costs $400-$500 for your level, compared to the thousands and thousands of dollars your friends are paying. In the meantime you're working and making money.
It's a financial incentive. That's what got me in there.
:
I'm on a middle ground. I wasn't fully trained for a another trade or for anything. I went to the University of Ottawa for two years, and I hated every minute I was there, so I went another route and shopped around, working wherever it was. I recently discovered that my dad giving me the job offer was an attempt to scare me back into university, but I tried it and I liked it. It backfired. It was six of one, half dozen of the other.
I have to agree that there's a big problem with the secondary education system and the stigma that lies between colleges and universities. For example, when I said to my boyfriend's cousin, “Oh, you got into college”, his mother just jumped all over me saying, “No, he got into university.”
It's a post-secondary program. I graduated from high school in 2005, and the stigma I understand is still there to this day, eight years later: smart kids go to university, stupid kids go to college. If I were to show any of you the math that I have to do, or the science.... I could teach you the physics of air. I know that. I can design a duct system. Stupid people can't do that.
There's a lot in every trade that everybody needs to do. There are people who need a lot of help math-wise, science-wise, English-wise, or with everything. We learn differently or we excel in different fields, but these stigmas override that. It really does need to be addressed, because it is a wonderful opportunity, a wonderful trade. Everyone I know who's in it isn't regretting that they're in it. They're in it because they love it.
:
Thank you very much. Thanks, everyone, for taking some time to join us today. I greatly appreciate it.
I too grew up on a construction site, with a father who ran a construction company. I'm an orthopedic surgeon. I just use a different hammer and saw, and they cost a lot more.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Ms. Kellie Leitch: One of the issues—and Kayla, you raised this—is this issue of stigma. It's come up in many of the discussions we've had with respect to this study and others, whether it be parents, guidance counsellors, or others. Tell me succinctly the number one thing we should do to combat and deal with that.
I know this presents a challenge. Is it about advertising? Is it about talking directly to students? What would you say if I asked each one of you, all five of you, to tell us the number one thing we should do to deal with the stigma? It seems to be a huge barrier. What should we do?
Éric, what do you think?
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I don't really have an answer, but I do have a stepping stone.
I don't know what the curriculum is across the nation, but in the city of Ottawa, it was mandatory for me to take civics and careers in grade 10. It is mandatory for each section. You have to take x number of sciences, x number of maths through high school. Two trades should be mandatory. Trades need to be reintroduced into high school. Trades are gone.
You're of course going to get teenagers complaining, but that's not a foreign concept.
As you said, I was fortunate enough to grow up around a family of farmers and sheet metal workers and stuff, so although I never went on a job site, I was encouraged to do things for myself. I was told, “Well, I'm not going to hammer up your photo; you're going to go hammer up your photo in your room”, so I held a hammer.
I knew what I was doing, but my friends have no clue, and that is the first step: reintroduce trades and make them mandatory in high school, to a certain extent—just basic carpentry or something.
:
I'll start by explaining the exact procedure that we have to follow.
One of the things that EI or Service Canada has done well is to allow us to apply up to two weeks ahead of schedule, before we actually start our classroom training. We get a letter in the mail that gives us a reference code that allows us to complete our online application for employment insurance. Our claims still do not get processed until a record of employment is handed in, of course, but at least there's a bit of a head start on our claim. As soon as they receive a record of employment, we should start receiving benefits.
That said, this is a perfect year for this example. In my case, we didn't receive our reference code ahead of time. We received it on day one of our classroom training. That was late. We were told that was a Service Canada issue and not an Algonquin College issue because those reference numbers get sent out with our schedules.
I completed my online application on day one, as soon as we met with the EI representatives, and I submitted my record of employment about a week later, because that was when I finally received it from my employer.
As I said, I got a message saying that they hadn't received my record of employment. It was about three weeks ago that I finally received this message. I called the 1-800 number. All you get is an automated message saying that if you want more information, go to the website. There was no option to actually speak to somebody right then. I had to call a separate number that was for reporting my online claims, and when I finally got to an option to talk to somebody and I finally reached that person and talked to them, the only answer I got was, “I'll look into it.”
Do you know what I mean? They say, “I agree. It's not showing up in our computer system; it should have, within 10 days of your submitting it, so I will put out a request to get it registered.” Now I'm waiting for another phone call to say, “Yes, we got your record of employment; everything is registered, and we've started your claim.”
My first closing remark would be getting back to how to make things easier for apprentices while they're going through school. I feel apprentice wages have to have some sort of standardization. I can't use myself as an example because I feel I have a somewhat decent salary as an apprentice, and it has been gradually increased as I've been completing levels.
There are two guys in my level 3 right now who have been getting paid $13 an hour since day one. How do you justify a four-year apprenticeship being paid the same rate until they're licensed? If you're straight out of high school and you're still a young kid and you're just starting your life, it's not a huge deal, but if it was a guy like me, someone who left a career to do another career, having to sit through a four-year apprenticeship program making $13 an hour makes things kind of difficult.
The other comment I have is about wages in general in my trade as a technician. One thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around is that if you go back to shop labour rates 10 years ago and compare them to today, they've pretty much almost doubled, but technician wages have barely budged. That's probably something else to consider. Raising the prestige level of the trade means raising its income. If shops are raising their rates that much, there should be some sort of compensation for the technicians. We're the ones doing all the work in the end.
:
I have just a couple of things.
One, I think it's a fantastic idea—I forget who brought it up—to separate the training supplement EI from the rest of the intake.
I have guys who are in town from Sudbury. They don't have enough money to go home to see their kids. Algonquin has a very big draw, so only about one-quarter of us are from town; everybody else is from out of town and living in town, so they're living at greater expense. Really, these guys need their money more than I do.
Also, I'm in one of the trades with the highest journeyman-to-apprentice ratios; I believe they are carpentry and sheet metal work. You can have one apprentice and one journeyman. After your first apprentice, it is four journeypersons to one apprentice, so it's the same as what you're saying. To get people through, that's a lot of money. I work in a small shop, and we don't have the money to do that, so I think that needs to be addressed.
Otherwise, I wish you all good luck.