:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and honourable members. I'm really pleased to be here today to speak to you regarding the health of older workers.
As we all know, older Canadians make a vital contribution to society. We are committed to supporting their health, well-being, and quality of life so they can stay active and involved in their communities.
At the Public Health Agency of Canada, our role is to promote the health of Canadians and prevent and control diseases through leadership, partnership, innovation, and action in public health. While our mandate is not specific to the workforce, we promote the health of all Canadians so they can participate fully in their communities, which includes, of course, the workplace.
Helping Canadians to make health choices is a shared responsibility. We work together with multiple levels of government, with stakeholders, and with researchers in order to encourage a sustained approach to health promotion that's based on the very best evidence available.
An example of this collaboration is seen in the commitment to helping Canadians lead healthier lives, as illustrated through the declaration on prevention and promotion. This declaration was endorsed by federal, provincial and territorial governments in 2010 and advances a multi-sectoral approach to the promotion of health and the prevention of disease, disability, and injury. The premise of this declaration is that health promotion is everyone's business.
While Canadians today enjoy a healthier life and are able to live longer, many live longer with serious health issues. Recent statistics tell us that 90% of Canadians aged 65 and over live with at least one chronic disease or condition, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, respiratory conditions, diabetes, dementia, arthritis, and obesity.
The good news is that many of the health challenges facing older Canadian are preventable. That's why the Public Health Agency focuses on health promotion and disease prevention through the life course.
Our goal is to increase the years Canadians spend in good health. The agency does this through our programs that promote healthy living, such as, for example, helping Canadians choose healthier foods and being more physically active. Our efforts to support healthy weights in childhood and to promote positive mental health have lifelong effects in preventing serious chronic diseases.
By promoting healthier living across the life course, we're setting the stage for maintaining good mental and physical health, reducing the likelihood of disease as we age, and promoting participation in the workforce. For example, the agency promotes multi-generational well-being, including supporting parents, grandparents, and caregivers through community-based programs for children and their families.
These programs provide funding to help communities to respond to the health and development needs of pregnant women, young children, and their families facing conditions of risk. They cover such issues as nutrition, infant care, immunization, parenting, and early childhood development. They also include positive mental health and injury prevention.
We have developed partnerships with pharmacies, provincial governments, and local public health units to disseminate a diabetes risk questionnaire called CanRisk, which helps Canadians identify the risk of having diabetes. They can then take appropriate measures to avert or delay the onset of this disease.
Successful interventions in one community can often benefit others. The agency gathers and shares these interventions through the Canadian best practices portal. This web-based portal provides a listing of trusted and credible resources designed to promote health and prevent chronic disease and injury. Ten of the best-practice interventions on the portal provide support for healthy workplaces that can also benefit older adults. For example, there's a program for working adults to improve their dietary habits, and there's a self-help intervention to promote active commuting among employees.
In addition to these initiatives, the agency supports immunization as an effective means to protect Canadians from infectious disease, through outreach initiatives such as the national campaign in the fall to promote influenza vaccination for Canadians, including people over the age of 65, since they are a particularly high-risk group.
We also promote the health of Canadian seniors through the age-friendly communities initiative. The agency works with partners on this initiative, including the World Health Organization, all three levels of government in Canada, seniors' organizations, community groups, and planners.
The age-friendly communities initiative is about engaging older adults and community leaders in the creation of supportive built and social environments. Its focus is on making communities more age-friendly so that more Canadians can age in good health. In turn, good health enables people to continue working.
An age-friendly community provides options for older people to continue to contribute to their communities, through paid employment or voluntary work if they so choose. To promote mental health for older people, we engage with partner organizations such as the Canadian Coalition for Seniors' Mental Health and the National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly to share tools and resources for families and practitioners. These resources help those caring for seniors to recognize risks and warning signs related to depression, delirium, and mental health problems, and offer guidance on how to best manage these mental health issues.
Through budget 2007, the federal government provided $130 million over 10 years to establish and support the Mental Health Commission of Canada to act as a focal point for mental health issues. In 2012, the Mental Health Commission launched “Changing Directions, Changing Lives: The Mental Health Strategy for Canada”. This strategy serves as a non-prescriptive blueprint to guide actions to improve the mental health of Canadians.
The agency is also working to improve Canadian data on the mental health of older Canadians. Specifically, to fill in gaps and knowledge about rates of neurological conditions in Canada, such as Alzheimer's disease, and their effects on individuals, families, and caregivers, we are working with Canada's major neurological charities on a four-year population study of Canadians affected by neurological conditions. The results of this study will be available next year in 2014 and will help inform the development of programs and services for Canadians living with neurological conditions, many of whom are older Canadians.
Working with partners to promote healthy aging and to prevent and delay the onset of chronic disease, we will continue to take steps towards improving the health and well-being of Canadian seniors.
Thank you.
:
Mr. Chair, and honourable members of the committee,
[Translation]
on behalf of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), I would like to thank you for the invitation to speak with you today, and to share with you how the CIHR and its Institute of Aging can contribute to providing evidence to assist you in your reflection on the health dimension of the aging workforce.
[English]
The aging Canadian population is characterized by the fact that Canadians will work later in their life due to a number of factors, including financial necessity and the desire to pursue an active contribution to society. But as you've just heard from Margaret Gillis, my colleague from the Public Health Agency of Canada, this situation poses new challenges as aging, even active aging, is frequently accompanied by chronic health conditions. Although these conditions can be controlled by lifestyle choices, including physical activity and medications, they can still interfere with the ability of older adults to participate fully in the workforce. This results in multiple impacts, including the fact that maintaining a working contribution to society is known to favour active aging, by itself. The challenge of the aging population also means that younger workers are increasingly contributing as caregivers to older relatives living with major and complex health challenges.
[Translation]
Although these challenges are recognized, the evidence from health research is not always available. It is the mission of the CIHR to provide such evidence. The CIHR was established in 2000 by Parliament as recognition that investments in health and the health care system are part of the Canadian vision of being a caring society.
CIHR's objectives are (a) to excel, according to internationally accepted standards of scientific excellence, in the creation of new knowledge, but also (b) to translate new knowledge into improved health for Canadians and more effective health services and products.
[English]
The Government of Canada is currently investing approximately $1 billion in CIHR to provide leadership and support to approximately 14,000 of the best researchers and trainees across the country. CIHR integrates research through a unique interdisciplinary structure made up of 13 virtual institutes. One of these 13 institutes is the Institute of Aging. Its mission is to foster the creation and dissemination of knowledge to ensure active aging, as well as to provide the optimal interventions, services, and health systems needed by older adults facing complex health challenges. Through strategic investments and its investigator-initiated programs, CIHR devoted over $100 million in 2011-12 to research on different aspects of health and aging, ranging from basic biomedical research to patient-oriented research, and from research on health services and systems to social dimensions of aging.
[Translation]
Over the last 12 years, the Institute of Aging has been proactive in ensuring that Canada has the required research capacity to deliver the necessary knowledge related to health and aging. With this research capacity, the Institute of Aging has been engaged in supporting research in priority areas such as cognitive impairment, mobility, and the identification of optimal health services and systems for older persons.
[English]
There have been research efforts in the work, aging, and health domains. Researchers such as Professor Lan Gien, from Memorial University in Newfoundland, have been supported by CIHR to help to better understand the strategies that enhance productive and healthy environments for the older workforce. Professor Peter Smith, from the University of Toronto, studies the impact of physical conditions and depression on the labour market participation of older workers in Canada, with a consideration of gender. CIHR has also put in place a research platform that will contribute to these questions in the coming years: the Canadian longitudinal study on aging, or CLSA. This important strategic initiative will provide evidence and an understanding of the internal and external factors determining aging from mid-life to older age. It includes 11 different universities and a national team of more than 160 researchers and collaborators. CLSA will provide information on the changing biological, medical, psychological, social, lifestyle, and economic aspects of 50,000 Canadians aged between 45 and 85, followed for a period of 20 years. To date, more than 25,000 people have signed up.
Participation in the labour force plays an important role in social functioning and has an influence on successful aging through factors such as income and wealth, self-esteem and social standing, stress and occupational exposures. The CLSA will examine how these and other factors influence health outcomes over time.
[Translation]
As the study evolves, the Institute of Aging will explore ways to make sure that Canadian researchers will receive the support needed to take advantage of this large repository of data to inform important questions and provide the necessary evidence through CLSA's directed secondary analyses, for example. We will also ensure that the resulting evidence will be shared in a timely and efficient manner with the public and policy makers.
[English]
Such planned actions are consistent with the Institute of Aging's newly introduced 2013-2018 strategic plan. This plan is organized around five priorities. The first two priorities are about understanding the life trajectory of active aging, as well as adding life to the later years. Actions will include work, aging, and health issues. The next two priorities are focused on the interventions and the optimal seamless health services and systems necessary to face the complex health challenges that some older Canadians have to live with. The last priority is about the evidence required to inform all stakeholders on how to empower Canadians regarding their active aging, how to best train the health workforce, and how to optimally adapt knowledge transfer for the aging population.
Along with two other CIHR Institutes—the Institute of Gender and Health and the Institute of Musculoskeletal Health and Arthritis—the Institute of Aging is engaged in exploring a new strategic initiative focused on work and health issues. This initiative would put emphasis on the accommodations required for health-supportive workplaces and work environments. This initiative represents a unique opportunity to include all factors, including social, technological, and management dimensions. This is why we already have had encouraging discussions with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada about this initiative.
[Translation]
CIHR and the Institute of Aging consider that health is an important dimension of the aging workforce challenge. The Institute of Aging will make sure that the necessary evidence will be available for governments, policy makers and the aging Canadian population.
Thank you for your attention.
Mr. Chair, honourable members of the committee, the presentation that I'm making today results from my work that was done at the Commission nationale sur la participation au marché du travail des travailleuses et travailleurs expérimentés de 55 ans et plus.
This commission has done its work at the end of 2010 and 2011. We'll move to the workplace now and I'll describe what has come out as a synthesis of the analysis that I submitted to this commission.
[Translation]
First, I would like to mention the overall title, which is “Diversité des pratiques, souplesse d'application et importance d'une perspective pragmatique”.
Practices in labour organization that are designed to keep employees at work or to bring retirees back to work represent new approaches for businesses, after the wave of early retirements from 1980 to 1990. At the time, that was called “Freedom 55”.
Economic cycles, demographics and labour shortages have contributed to the fact that extending working lives is more and more necessary. But that is not achieved under any conditions. Workers will delay their retirement only when it suits them, meaning when the conditions keep the work interesting when compared to total retirement. A number of studies have highlighted the need for flexible work hours and for working conditions to be reorganized with a view to accommodating an active lifestyle in the workplace.
With its foundation in those known observations, this presentation tries to answer the following questions. What are the results of those accommodations? Are there lessons to be learned? In various kinds of businesses, private or public, large or small, what are the main conditions that hinder or encourage employees to stay at work or retirees to return to work?
From the analysis of significant practices found in the literature, and from discussions with players from a number of different workplaces in Quebec, observations, both general and specific, become clear. We identify four general ones.
First, there is a need for a variety of approaches and practices. One-size-fits-all programs do not hurt, but they cannot achieve the same scope, or the same buy-in, that is the result of a multi-pronged approach that operates in parallel in various ways. Examples might be flexible work hours, physical and ergonomic considerations, training plans for experienced workers, training trainers, planning for the next generation, and promoting awareness about the expertise that experienced workers have. A flexible schedule seems to be of critical importance in encouraging people to stay at work.
The second general observation is that communication and collaboration between everyone in the organization is a vital condition for driving the desired changed. The challenge in this aspect is that the emphasis must be on “everyone”.
The third observation is that the processes we are studying take place in a wider context that shapes the results of the approaches. It is therefore necessary to consider the backgrounds in which the genesis and operation of workplace practices are set. This particularly means the legislation and regulations already in place that encourage, or perhaps limit, the workplace participation of workers 55 and older.
The fourth and last general observation is that business practices designed to keep employees at work or to bring retirees back to work seem to be more widespread in Europe. In Sweden specifically, we see a much more pragmatic approach, and one that is shared by all. That encourages the establishment of effective programming.
I would now like to present the more specific observations. They are six in number.
First, the variety of dimensions, which I mentioned in the general observations, is manifested in different ways depending on the context, the business and the nature of the workforce.
Second, it may be useful, particularly for SMEs, to engage an external agent in order to implement change. The changes will have enhanced credibility, and, as a result, the acceptance by those involved that the changes are legitimate will also be enhanced. This is key to workplace buy-in.
Third, in the case of SMEs, an external agent may be able to partially make up for the lack of a human resources or staffing department with this objective as its role.
I see that time waits for no man and that I will not be able to cover everything. I had some statistics about the significance of SMEs to the Canadian economy.
This particular observation takes on even more importance when we consider that SMEs with fewer than 50 or 100 employees often have no human resources department. So the person running the SME is the one who, among all the other functions, manages retirements or creates the initiatives that will keep, or not keep, employees on the payroll.
Additionally, experienced workers are often recognized for their loyalty, their commitment to the success of the business and their trustworthiness. An example is in customer service. Those characteristics make them all the more attractive to employers because they are those for which young workers, especially those in generation Y, are often criticized. I do not want to generalize or point fingers in the slightest; the comment is not mine, but it is often heard. This combination of circumstances could help to reduce the discrimination that experienced workers often suffer and that, paradoxically, they often perpetuate, especially after the loss of a job.
The final specific observation is that, at the intersection of professional life and family life, a concept mentioned in other presentations, major changes are taking place because of the increasingly healthy life expectancy and the role of older family members. Both public authorities, through their legislation and their control mechanisms, and employers and employee representatives desirous of making it easier to stay at work, must be aware of these aspects and prepare for accommodations as a result.
Finally, beyond the observations, both general and specific, we must deal with the realities of the business context and any possibilities of keeping employees at work or bringing retirees back to work that are provided in forms that are sufficiently interesting to achieve buy-in from experienced workers. They vary greatly depending on the size of the business and its nature; for example, if it is engaged in manufacturing or in services, or whether it is in the public or private sector. In that context, I am thinking about retirement programs that must be considered in terms of intergenerational fairness. We must consider what awaits the younger generations and ask ourselves if it is appropriate to allow the accumulation of several retirement schemes.
One of the main challenges in encouraging participation in the workforce will be to account for both those specific factors and the needs of employers, employees and their representatives when the tools are being designed and put to work.
Thank you.
I thank the witnesses for being here with us.
Welcome, Mr. Bédard. You are the only one I had not met yet. My first question will in fact be for you.
I am going to talk about workers of 50 years or more, rather than those of 55 years or more. Indeed, as soon as the zero becomes a five, that seems to be very significant in the minds of people and employers.
When a plant or a mill closes, very often, the older employees—that is to say those of 50 or more—don't have the necessary skills to take on another type of job, and don't even have basic computer skills or literacy, and so forth.
Continuous training, including basic skills, provided within a business during a person's entire career could be one solution, if that person requests it, of course.
I would like to know how that could be done. Could the federal government do something in that regard? Do you have any thoughts on a possible cooperative effort involving the government, employers, workers and the unions? Do you have any suggestions to make in that regard?
:
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for this invitation.
I am sorry, but I have not prepared a presentation. So I will try to use the 10 minutes to give you a summary of the research on population aging I have conducted over the past 10 years. I may leave you more time for questions.
In 2004, I began working on the issue of population aging. I worked at the Strategic Policy and Management Branch of the Privy Council Office. I helped formulate the OECD recommendations. In 2006, I began another project on labour market flexibility, and I combined the two projects. A report was published by the Centre for Interuniversity Research in Analysis of Organizations, CIRANO. So I will try to summarize the results of that report for you.
When I began my research work on population aging, that issue had three aspects. I will try to briefly explain my contribution to the research projects on population aging.
The best known aspect of population aging is a declining birth rate, coupled with an increased life expectancy—a combination that increases the dependency rate. Fewer and fewer people will have to support a growing number of seniors. This aspect attracts the most attention owing to the impacts on health care spending and pension plan viability.
Another aspect of population aging—which we have been anticipating for years—is the mass retirement of baby boomers from the workforce. That underscores the labour shortage issue those mass retirements can lead to. There are questions on training, mobility and on the way to attract those older workers.
In this whole debate, the aspect that has received the least attention—and this is the aspect I have been studying—is employer response. We were able to analyze the offer thanks to data availability. We asked older workers what could motivate them to remain in the workforce longer. They said they were interested in working conditions and flexible working hours. The offer—in other words, ways to retain older workers—was given serious consideration.
In order to remove barriers and allow people to remain in the workforce longer, employers should also show commitment and implement practices that promote the retention of older workers.
I have looked at the least-studied aspect—which is referred to as the increase in the average age of the workforce. That aspect is not only related to aging. The population is now increasingly educated. People begin working later in their lives. Consequently, they continue working until a later age. Some immigrants begin their career later in life and will consequently retire later. That is all taking place in a service sector that promotes retention. That is why the average age of the workforce has increased. What is happening? This trend creates a pyramid or an imbalance in company workforce demographics. That means that there is a growing number of older workers. This will have an impact on payrolls and costs for employers.
Using data that matches up employers and employees, I tried to determine how companies were responding to that demographic composition of their workforce. How are companies responding to the increase in the number of older workers? They are responding in two ways.
Companies' first option is to use variable pay schemes, a form of wage flexibility—either through individual performance bonuses or team performance bonuses—in order to avoid seniority-based wages. That is a form of flexibility companies are trying to establish to manage their payrolls.
Another option is the use of part-time, temporary and self-employed workers. That is another form of flexibility—called numerical flexibility—that helps reduce payrolls.
It is clear that, as the proportion of older workers increases in a company, the use of part-time workers increases as well. We can say that part-time work is not a problem because, on the one hand, it helps companies adjust to a turbulent context and, on the other hand, it allows older workers to combine work and phased retirement, young people to combine work and studies, and women to combine work and family responsibilities. So it seems that flexibility is not a bad thing in itself and that it helps satisfy the needs of employees and employers.
However, when we consider it in a life-course perspective, over the long term, that flexibility can influence access to training and social benefits. It can also affect the accumulation of pension funds. Flexibility can have long-term consequences in those areas.
Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of flexibility. Employers seek flexibility by using an increasingly flexible labour force composed of part-time, temporary and self-employed workers. However, that is not the kind of flexibility employees are looking for. They want flexibility in terms of working hours and working conditions. How can a balance be struck between those needs? That is the challenge in terms of public policies on labour.
The European experience shows that addressing that flexibility issue provides an opportunity not only for seniors, but also for the general population. I will give you an example. Older workers need flexibility, but young people are also increasingly seeking that flexibility, as are women. It is no longer so much an issue of work-family flexibility, but, above all, work-personal life flexibility. Greater focus should be placed on labour market transitions. In addition, we want to know what the effect of that flexibility is on labour market exclusion.
Let's take for example the transition from school to the labour market. If a policy aims to determine whether immigrants need certain qualifications to integrate the labour market, the risks or obstacles involved should be identified. If the problem stems from a lack of qualifications, our graduates also need that experience on the labour market to have a successful transition to the workforce. So the problem stems from a lack of labour market experience.
If we want to have a phased retirement policy to help older workers remain in the workforce, why not have the same policy for disabled people? Why not view partial retirement in the same way we view partial disability?
So the current challenge in public policy is to find a way to address risks instead of groups.
Our economy was in a context of labour shortage. All our programs and policies were implemented in that context. I am trying to elevate the debate. Employers want to retain workers. They have established defined benefit pension plans. The seniority principle was used to retain that labour force. Forced retirement was instituted, and it also helped employers get rid of employees whose performance was unsatisfactory. Mandatory retirement has been abolished so that interested workers can stay, but employers are sometimes stuck with certain employees. I have talked to chamber of commerce representatives. No one is saying this, but people don't want to keep all the workers. In addition, who will take charge of training?
The challenge still consists in considering that notion of flexibility, the demand for flexibility and the importance of training. It is a matter of figuring out how to address these issues in a broader context than that of population aging.
Thank you.
:
Thank you very much, and for the invitation to appear.
My remarks are drawn from and really build upon the federal 2008 report of the expert panel on older workers, for which I was the research director, as well as my own research on older workers and disabilities. I have prepared some remarks, and I think I'm basically going to follow along the lines of those remarks that I prepared.
I hope to provide you with what is primarily a labour market and workforce perspective on the issue of opportunities for older persons. The first question I would pose is, why would we worry about encouraging older workers to stay in the labour force?
First, from a labour market viewpoint, the aging of the labour force translates into a declining growth rate in the labour force. This can lead, of course, to lower growth in total economic output and may even affect output per person as well. The labour supply issue could be quite significant. Best estimates are that immigration alone cannot come close to counteracting the effects of the aging of the population on the labour force, so there are two considerations. First, more older workers can be encouraged to participate in the labour force at all ages on an ongoing basis. Second, older workers can be encouraged to work for more years.
Second, from a personal economic viewpoint, some older workers may need the income, either as a primary source of income or to supplement a pension.
Third, from a personal or social viewpoint, older workers may seek fulfillment from meaningful employment.
I want to turn briefly to some background labour market context for older workers. It's pretty clear that workplaces and labour markets in general are subject to several long-term pressures that are particularly relevant to older workers. First and foremost, of course, is economic globalization and all that this entails. This has created significant pressures on certain industries, causing job losses in such industries as forestry, paper, segments of manufacturing in some primary industries, and is especially relevant in single-industry-town situations. Second is technological change, which renders certain skills obsolete, requiring basic retraining and education. It also requires constant up-skilling, with new skills being required on the same job, and this is especially a challenge for older workers, who typically have lower levels of education.
I want to turn very briefly to labour market characteristics of older workers.
What is the situation of older workers in the labour market, recognizing, of course, that it changes over time and in relation to overall economic conditions? First, with respect to the configuration of jobs, older workers tend more often than other groups to find themselves in non-standard jobs that are part-time or in contract-type positions. This provides flexibility for older workers to meet other requirements, such as a desire for fewer hours to meet their personal preferences, supplement retirement income, or balance work and other family obligations. However, other older workers may work part time or non-standard work but not be able to obtain full-time employment that they desire.
Second, both the employment rates and participation rates of older workers are by far the lowest in the labour force. They tend to be less than 40%, relative to about 65% to 70% for the workforce generally.
Third, with regard to the unemployment experience of older workers, their rate of unemployment tends to be lower than the overall unemployment rate, but once employed, their period of unemployment tends to last longer and their loss of earnings relative to pre-unemployment earnings levels tends to be larger. That is, the new job the older worker gets typically pays less than the job they just lost.
There are also important differences in unemployment rates of older workers: a lower unemployment rate in urban areas relative to rural, and significant differences across regions of Canada, typically running lower moving from the east to the west.
Finally, I'd like to turn to some of the barriers for older workers. Many older workers have been employed in industries and/or in single-industry areas that are in decline, or they simply experience long-term employment situations. And older workers tend to have less education and advanced training, whereas the younger groups tend to be better educated and trained. So several problems arise.
First, many older workers have skills that are very specific to their previous or long-term job, and retraining may need to be extensive in cases where an entirely new job is the objective.
Second, investing in older workers, in terms of training and education, leaves a shorter period in which to capture returns to that investment, and the fact that many have lower levels of education to start with means that further learning is even more challenging.
Third, older workers may experience bias from employers who simply believe that younger workers are better learners.
Fourth, in seeking jobs elsewhere, relocation costs can be quite high because of home transfer costs, community investments, family bonds, and so forth.
Finally, with respect to aging and disability, the percentage of employed Canadians with a disability rises from just over 3% among those between the ages of 20 and 24 to reach well over 12% by the time Canadians reach the 60 to 64 age range. We can therefore predict with some confidence that a growing share of Canadian workers will have disabilities and will want or need to continue working, notwithstanding the fact that they have disabilities.
If they are to work productively and with equal opportunity, many will need employers to design, adapt, and manage workplaces so as to enable them to overcome activity limitations; in short, they will need accommodation.
In our own research we find that a sizeable fraction of persons with disabilities say they are not receiving the accommodations they in fact need in order to work, and to work productively. Widespread employee reports of accommodation shortfalls are consistent with other research documenting the frequent negative influence of information gaps, stereotyping, economic incentives or disincentives to accommodate these workers, workplace cultural resistance, and so forth related to persons with disabilities.
These considerations point to the need to consider a coordinated national strategy to address workplace accommodation gaps. This approach has the benefit of providing a degree of universal measure that enhances access to effective accommodation across all employees in workplaces, while ensuring there is minimal opportunity for economic disincentives to accommodate. A universal program in this specific area could, for example, take the form of a highly coordinated federal-provincial set of policies that taken together provide fairly complete coverage.
In conclusion, I'd like to identify several overarching themes that emerge regarding older workers.
First is simply acknowledging that there is a meaningful role, or roles, for the federal government in supporting the participation and employment of older workers.
Second is that active support measures for human capital development, including general education and specific training, remain essential to encouraging meaningful work for older persons, and to achieve results on a broad scale government support, at some level, would likely be required.
Third, the federal government should consider, first, targeting policy very carefully, especially in terms of addressing specific barriers to older workers; second, continuing to examine current programs to ensure that they minimize disincentives to participate in the labour force; and third, taking a lead on encouraging accommodation for workers with disability, a problem that will become increasingly important as the workforce ages.
Thank you.
:
Thank you very much, Chair.
And thank you to both of you for very excellent presentations. I'm a bit sorry that I have only seven minutes to continue this conversation.
I want to start with a general observation. We have 1.4 million unemployed Canadians right now, and in my home town of Hamilton the youth unemployment rate is twice the national average. So when we talk about the need to retain older workers, I think there are significant regional discrepancies in labour force development, particularly with respect to skills shortages. I think both of you have talked about that in different ways.
Mr. Chaykowski, you just finished by talking about the government needing to be very careful about not creating disincentives for participation in the labour force, yet I think about my sister-in-law, who is a teacher and eligible to retire in January. She wanted to continue teaching until June to finish out the school year, but the school board is actually buying her out because it's cheaper for them to bring in younger teachers. And again, there are a significant number of young Canadians looking for work—which again is perhaps a regional issue.
On retention, I want to talk specifically to you, Mr. Béjaoui, about it because I think you talked about pensions as being both a carrot and stick for retention.
In some workplaces, if you have a defined benefit plan you may well decide that you want to continue to work, because you want to maximize your pension benefits at the end of your working life. On the other hand, if as a government policy you raise the age of OAS eligibility to 67, for example, it's no longer a choice for many people whether they want to continue working; they have to. So in that case pension policy is a stick rather than a carrot.
I wonder if you could comment about pensions in particular with respect to retention.
I want to thank our two witnesses. Their presentations were very insightful.
I would like to begin with a short comment, which will lead to a question. I will follow up on what Ms. Charlton said earlier. At times, I am under the impression that apples and oranges are being compared.
Population aging and the retention of older workers in the workforce constitute a broad issue. However, that issue covers very different realities. For a professional such as a notary, lawyer or chemist, working until the age of 70 or 75 without problems is not difficult to imagine. If you are an astrophysicist and your name is Hubert Reeves, it would appear that you can even keep working until the age of 178. However, it's a whole different story for garbage collectors, factory workers in an assembly line, construction workers or grocery store cashiers, who spend all day on their feet.
Moreover, 70% of Canadian workers have no supplementary pension fund. That means most of them are relying only on public funds, especially Old Age Security. I agree with letting people work longer, but don't you think that should be up to them? Don't you think that should be an opportunity to be seized. Wouldn't you agree that workers should not be forced to work longer only for financial reasons, such as not being able to afford food otherwise?
If we look back five or 10 years, when people like David Foot started to flag the enormity of the demographic challenge and what that meant for the labour force, I think one of the main motivating factors in worrying about aging from an economics viewpoint was the slowing growth in the labour force, which would slow economic growth as well.
That's a distinct effect from what was raised earlier, the question of pockets of high unemployment, an overall unemployment rate of 7% plus, which is layered on top of the demographic. At the personal level, there's just the issue of choice as an older worker, that someone is 69 years old, is still feeling pretty healthy and wants to top up their pension, or just doesn't want to sit at home. That's the individual choice part.
These are all distinct pieces, I think. They all work together—not always in the same direction, but they're all happening at the same time.
I've never put as much stock in the overall slowing in the growth of the labour force as others, for two reasons. One, I have a much stronger belief in the capacity of employers to substitute capital for labour, in other words technological change. We've all seen many examples of significantly reduced workforces. Employers will make the changes and adapt to the changes required in workforce levels. That being said, it doesn't mean that a macroeconomic problem wouldn't be involved with the slowing of the workforce. But individual employers have a pretty strong capacity to adapt, so I'm less worried about that.
Two, what we're experiencing today at the micro level, and what sometimes clouds the issue, is the idea that we have skills bottlenecks. We have pockets in Hamilton and other areas in eastern Canada or even western Canada. In certain occupations and trades in Alberta, we have high demand or high unemployment rates, depending on the circumstance. These bottlenecks are ongoing problems. We have a relatively high unemployment rate. That doesn't take away from the issue of having to address the needs of older workers in the labour force.
There is one further complication, which is the odds-on bet that we're in for a prolonged period of slow economic growth. This may translate into a prolonged period of relatively high unemployment compared to, say, the late nineties and 2000s. That being said that still doesn't take away from the need to address older workers in the labour force.
These layers from the macro down to the micro are all in play, and I think it can be a little confusing because sometimes they don't seem to be working in the same direction. I'll be very specific to finish. Simply saying we have a high unemployment rate doesn't necessarily mean that we shouldn't try to attract older workers into the labour force for longer, increase their participation rate, or encourage them to work longer in their careers. They're not mutually inconsistent.
One last point is that I would not advocate widespread or wholesale policy interventions. I think it's extremely important to identify the dysfunction in the labour market and then address the policy at those dysfunctions as opposed to broad-based policies.
Thank you, witnesses. This is a great discussion today. I really appreciate your what I would call straight talk and to-the-fact type of analysis.
Like Ms. Charlton, I come from a community where in the late 1980s or the early 1990s we had a 32% unemployment rate because of the demise of the farm implement manufacturing industry. If you were to take any lesson from what has happened since, because we're lower than the national average now—we're down to about 7.1%, I think, in the last statistics—it is that people are very adaptive at no matter what age.
I notice this in my community, especially with what a lot of people would call—and don't take it in a derogatory way—the blue-collar town that we were and in many ways still are. A lot of manufacturing is still on, but that adaptability and your discussion, Mr. Chaykowski, about fluidity, I really like.
I'm really cluing in on that word because rethinking the paradigms, rethinking the things that have been the social norms, is really important I think in advancing the health of Canadians, the health of all workers, and the opportunities that exist. Frankly, as an entrepreneur and business owner throughout my whole life, I think a lot of the responsibility lies at the foot of the employers. I think it does.
I think we have to get them rethinking. I think we have to get them rethinking about persons with disabilities, which has been one of my major passions. Also, obviously, you have senior workers who are getting into that same category of the double categorization—senior and disabilities—but I think it behooves governments and ourselves to know that when we do intervene, we're intervening on a strategic level that's going to be pragmatic and that's going to work, that's going to get to the essence of boots on the ground and is going to work.
One of the initiatives that we introduced and are rolling out right now is the Canada job grant. It offers employers opportunities. It offers government assistance no matter what age, no matter whether you're disabled or full-bodied. No matter what, it offers, in a non-biased way, opportunities. I think you're going to see employers step up to the plate on some of these fronts. I'm not saying it's the end-all and be-all. It may be just the beginning point. Like everything else, it's going to have supporters and detractors, but these kinds of things....
Mr. Béjaoui, in your original comments, your wrap-up statement was on the struggle for public policy. You said that there's this struggle for good public policy on these issues, and that's what we're trying to come to grips with.
I would ask maybe you, Mr. Chaykowski, to say a little more about that blueprint for fluidity. How do governments incorporate that into what is traditionally ideological thinking of the government and of the opposition, and the cut and thrust of politics? How does fluidity work in all of this?
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I wish I had the answer to that. I have a couple of observations that I hope might help. I am trained as an economist, and we economist types do believe in the power and relevance of market-based solutions.
But I think it's equally important to recognize that markets are imperfect—that's number one—and that there are market failures. That's why I keep emphasizing trying to understand what the market failure is. What is it that the market is not doing? That is usually the impetus or argument for a government intervention by virtue of a policy.
The other thing is that there's no such thing as free markets. We might like to see free markets, but we don't have free markets. We have in some cases what are close to free markets if you go down to the market square and buy your vegetables and you haggle, but generally we have a playing field within which markets function.
We have a legal context, a very important legal context, or a legal infrastructure, if you will, and then we have a government legislative infrastructure. I say all this because there's no such thing as a market without a playing field. It's government that largely sets that playing field. That's important because employers respond to incentives.
So if there is a failure out there in the following sense, which is that the employers are not doing x, that they're not employing older workers and they're not training them, that they're not making that investment, it may be well in the interests of the individual employer not to do that, but it may not be in the social interest, and there may be huge social costs associated with that. It may be perfectly rational and reasonable for the individual employer not to engage in that behaviour, but if enough employers do that, you get some very, very negative social outcomes.
That would be an example of a market failure that would I think call for some kind of a government intervention. In that case, my own sense would be that the best approach is to have a policy that creates incentives: incentives for employers to behave differently.