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Results: 136 - 150 of 342
Paul Kurdyak
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Paul Kurdyak
2020-12-04 13:49
The first thing I would say is that CAMH is a large place. I wouldn't know the specific details of that survey, so perhaps you could share them.
What I can say is that before the pandemic, we had been closely monitoring the youth. I think what's happening with youth is complicated. I suspect there was something going on pre-pandemic with the weird circumstances of this generation being steeped in social media like we were not. Sociologists and anthropologists have more to say about that than others, but we definitely noticed around 2019 a dramatic uptick in help-seeking behaviour amongst 16-to-24-year-olds that just keeps going up and up.
I work in a psychiatric emergency department. In my clinical work, we are also seeing dramatic increases in presentations amongst youth. The issue is that, as I said, the mental health system has never been particularly responsive to need. The entirety of the work that came out of my team in Ontario suggested that there really isn't a system.
You could choose many populations to focus on. I think transition-aged youth is as good as any because of the work that has been documented by surveys and by the phenomena that we're observing in our provincial data.
I think the equally important thing is that if we choose to intervene in a particular area, we have to do so in a way that allows us to iteratively measure—in other words, to learn consistently as we go, like we do for cancer.
Every cancer patient in Ontario not only benefits from evidence but contributes to it, precisely because information is routinely collected and used to constantly improve. That's kind of what we would like to see happening and what we are building towards in Ontario.
View Han Dong Profile
Lib. (ON)
Overall you were responsible for the youth file for how long?
Christiane Fox
View Christiane Fox Profile
Christiane Fox
2020-12-04 14:59
I was appointed deputy minister of youth in 2017, both for youth and intergovernmental affairs. From 2017 to 2019, I had both portfolios. Following the election of 2019, I only kept the intergovernmental affairs portfolio.
View Han Dong Profile
Lib. (ON)
Is it safe to say that you had a long-standing relationship with youth stakeholders?
Christiane Fox
View Christiane Fox Profile
Christiane Fox
2020-12-04 14:59
Yes, a number of them.
View Han Dong Profile
Lib. (ON)
It wouldn't be out of the ordinary for a public servant to have contact and a professional rapport with stakeholders that they deal with on a regular basis.
Christiane Fox
View Christiane Fox Profile
Christiane Fox
2020-12-04 14:59
No. In fact, I think it is helpful to engage directly. As deputy minister of youth, not only did I engage with youth-serving organizations, but I engaged directly with youth to try to really inform the work that we did in government. That meant working with several organizations.
For instance, I worked with Right to Play and I went up to Attawapiskat to run basketball clinics for youth to be able to connect with them in a very different way than I would in an Ottawa boardroom. I took that to heart as deputy minister of youth.
View Rachael Harder Profile
CPC (AB)
Thank you. I am going to interrupt there in the interest of time. I'm going to switch over to Sustainable Forestry Initiative.
I believe you discussed indigenous young people and the fact that the forest sector offers so much in the way of employment opportunities. You talked about the two billion trees and the fact that there is an opportunity there.
My understanding is that in order to make this a reality, hiring needs to take place fairly quickly. Training needs to be done and these individuals need to be mobilized and nurtured to go in this direction.
With regard to indigenous young people, perhaps you can discuss with us briefly the tremendous benefit the forest sector offers to indigenous folks, in particular those who are young and looking to come into the market.
Kathy Abusow
View Kathy Abusow Profile
Kathy Abusow
2020-12-04 14:14
Absolutely.
Many indigenous communities—not, all of course—are in rural communities. Not all, but most of the forest sector is in rural communities as well.
First of all, there's just this geographic alignment. The forest sector depends on trees, forests and the land. Indigenous communities have traditional ties to forests as a way of life. There is this sort of natural geographic connection as well as this love of forests, nature and dependence on forests. It puts forward indigenous people's ability to engage in the forest sector and to develop forest resources within their communities as part of the solution.
In COVID times, it's quite interesting. We had to shift our model. Earlier, we would work with camps and youth organizations and bring indigenous youth together for six-week experiences to learn basic skills. These are often at-risk youth. They would learn basic skills and get a driver's licence. They'd learn how a tree nursery works, how to grow seedlings and things like WHMIS and health and safety. We would get them some certifications and then show them the career pathway, like what tech school they could go to, such as Confederation College, Sault College or BCIT.
Then we would show them role models. We did this indigenous guide of career voices. We connected with different indigenous leaders in the forest sector in all sorts of different jobs and showed the pathway they took to get there—their traditional ways of knowing coupled with western education. Essentially, they learned that there is a pathway for them no matter what, because we were demonstrating all these different pathways.
View Patrick Weiler Profile
Lib. (BC)
Thank you so much, Professor Lewis.
My next question is for Ms. Abusow, following up on the comments of my colleague Mr. Sidhu. It's great to hear about the number of youth who have been able to get work experience through your organization.
My question is this. Do you see a role for youth who could be hired through the youth employment and skills strategy, the Canada summer jobs program or perhaps Canada Green Corps to contribute to the reforestation efforts we have committed to?
Second, how can we as a government best support the youth of today to be best positioned to contribute to the forest sector of the future?
Kathy Abusow
View Kathy Abusow Profile
Kathy Abusow
2020-12-04 14:19
Yes, absolutely, all of those programs, to the extent that they are interested, can certainly play an important role in providing youth with employment as part of the two billion trees strategy.
We've also heard many speakers talk as well about the need for a plan, so obviously there should be a larger plan that the youth get engaged in with regard to which species and where, as well as how to ensure diversity and resiliency and climate adaptation.
There most definitely is a role, and there is also a role for environmental education as part of this. In these training programs, when they are planning about trees, they can also learn about the world of trees and forests as windows onto the world and the sustainability solutions they can provide. They can start to learn some of these things we have heard about: the role of forests, the economic benefits, the conservation benefits, and the community benefits. What are the forests of the day? What are the forests of the future as well?
There are all sorts of learning opportunities, and I would love to do what we started to advance in our programs and in collaboration with others, which is to bust out the career pathway, so that if we need carbon modellers or we need mass timber architects or we need species recovery specialists with certain expertise in ecology and biology, we start demonstrating the skills that are required and the courses that should be taken, and that on-the-job experience is provided so that they get interested. That's the most rewarding thing that we've had so far. We've taken youth who really had no job prospects but who are now in a technical college or are going into a forestry school or into engineering.
The youth corps and the youth employment and skills strategy and all of these programs can support youth, and one of the things they can also do is support things like the two billion trees strategy. They can also support invasion strategies and many of the other topics and themes that we've heard about.
Florence Daviet
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Florence Daviet
2020-12-04 14:59
I don't think that I'm part of that. We do support Canadian forestry companies. We work with them. We have worked with them on trying to advance on multiple issues that they themselves have been wanting to advance on. I think CPAWS works a lot with numerous forestry companies in Canada and supports the actions they're taking when they're moving forward on biodiversity questions.
From my perspective—
Taylor Gunn
View Taylor Gunn Profile
Taylor Gunn
2020-12-03 11:13
I've heard it's a global pandemic, so you never know what power you have in your hands right now.
I will be flying through these slides. I've apologized in advance to the translators.
CIVIX is a national non-partisan, charitable organization working to develop the habits and skills of citizenship within students under the voting age. As it is probably most relevant today, I'll really focus on Student Vote. You'll see in the slides why I think that program is relevant for our discussions.
Turning to the second slide, just as quick background, Student Vote is a parallel election for students under the voting age that parallels official election periods. We've conducted that now for 18 years, for somewhere in the range of 50 levels of elections across Canada—municipal, provincial, territorial and federal. In the recent federal election, we had, I think it's fair to round, just under 10,000 schools register across Canada, with about 30 votes shy of 1.2 million student ballots cast. We use the currency of direct participation, not reach, because if I used reach, I could inform you, with tallied media hits and all that stuff, that we supposedly reached 350 million Canadians in the last election—of which there aren't—so let's go with direct participants.
In the third slide you'll see our geographic spread. I point this out because it's interesting to note that if we include all provinces and territories, we were in 63% of all schools across Canada. If we exclude our lowest jurisdiction, which is Quebec—I can talk about that later, if someone is interested—our average would increase to 70% of all schools in the country. I believe we are on par with matching or surpassing the number of schools that take part in the Terry Fox Run across Canada. I don't know of anyone else who's in more schools. That's fantastic for our democracy.
If you look at the map, you will see a visual display of the lovely democratic pressure we're putting from the north on the United States. Then there's something that anyone who's into politics likes—the results of our federal election in 2019. In terms of the turnout results, it's interesting to note the similarities and the differences on a national level. I'm happy to take questions on that.
In the next slide, you'll see something that you might very interesting—that is, how you fared in Student Vote in 2019. The member of the committee with the most number of schools registered in their jurisdiction is Mr. Lukiwski, who had 47 schools register. I don't know if he's here today.
Actually, you know what? I'm sorry; it was Mr. Doherty. I don't think he's here today either. He had 55 schools registered.
You'll see that in some of your jurisdictions, you'll have as many as just under 8,000 kids participate.
In the next slide you can see the national voting trends of the Student Vote participants over the last number of years. I put this out as valuable just because a lot of groups that are working on what you may call “youth civic engagement” are generalized as being on either the centre or the left. What's interesting to point out here is that other than one election of the last six federal elections, the Conservative Party of Canada obtains the most student votes in the raw ballot count across the country. It's just an interesting thing to point out. We're a non-partisan organization, and I don't like us to be generalized as centre or left or anywhere on the political spectrum.
If you were in our position, and you could reach 1.2 million students under the voting age from nearly 10,000 schools across Canada in the last federal election, I think you'd want to have an understanding of what you were actually aiming for, right? A couple of clues were given to us from previous reports put out by Elections Canada—at least, in this case, the 2011 and 2015 federal elections—from the national youth survey. What it did was draw a picture of what characteristics a young voter has. They have characteristics of being interested in the democratic or political process; being knowledgeable; thinking that voting and participating is a civic duty; talking with their family and friends, or being influenced by their family and friends, or having friends that could even influence them in the political process....
Ruby, I see your hand up. I might as well try to respond there.
Taylor Gunn
View Taylor Gunn Profile
Taylor Gunn
2020-12-03 11:19
Thank you.
What you also find that those who participate are more likely to have learned about democracy in school and to have participated in a parallel or mock election. You'll see in the following slides those characteristics of young voters; we cause those among our student participants during federal elections and, we presume, at the other levels of elections as well.
Then, very interestingly, from the third evaluation that was conducted on Student Vote by Elections Canada, we found that 28% of parents reported that their children's participation in Student Vote positively impacted their decision to vote in the election.
Finally, just out of interest, because I hope that all or most of us are proud Canadians, we have now expanded this outside of Canada to Colombia, where in last year's municipal elections in five different regions, we had 76,000 kids participate.
I put all this information out because that sets the stage for me to be able respond to questions that I hope can make us useful at today's appearance.
Thank you very much, everybody.
View Alain Therrien Profile
BQ (QC)
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Gunn, I want you to tell us more about employing young people.
During the pandemic, we spoke about the possibility of having weekend voting days, which could enable young people to work.
I want you to talk about this. I think that it's a good idea to employ 15- or 16-year-olds. At the same time, it teaches them how democracy works.
Results: 136 - 150 of 342 | Page: 10 of 23

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