DATE/DATE:
November 14, 2013, 11:00 a.m.
LOCATION/ENDROIT:
Aldred Centre, SAIT Polytechnic, Main Campus,
1301–16 Avenue NW, Calgary, Alberta
SUBJECT/SUJET:
Minister of Employment and Social Development and Minister for Multiculturalism Jason Kenney Delivers a Keynote Speech at the Polytechnics Canada Applied Research Showcase 2013.
Hon. Jason Kenney: Thank you very much, David. It’s great to be back home in Calgary and great to meet your colleagues, the presidents of Canada’s polytechnic institutes as well as a bunch of brilliant young students who are benefiting from the first-rate, world-class education that they’re receiving here at SAIT and in similar colleges around the country. This is where the rubber hits the road in terms of the future of our economy in so many ways—real, practical, high-quality skills development and applied research with real commercial applications. What we’re seeing here today is a model for post-secondary education. And it’s a real pleasure to be here at the eighth annual Student Applied Research Showcase in particular.
Before coming down to the podium, I took a quick tour around upstairs and met some of the students who are with us now and saw some of the displays in the showcase, and I thought to myself, this is exactly what Canadian businesses have been talking about. Employers in Canada and around the world increasingly need high-skilled workers in an increasingly competitive global labour market. And competitions like this one are a fantastic way to inspire young people to explore careers in fields that are in really high demand.
So I want to spend some time, first of all, talking about Polytechnics Canada and what it does because I think this sector of education has found a model that works, and you’ve refined it more quickly and nimbly than perhaps any other sector in post-secondary education in Canada to be relevant to the needs of our economy today and in the future.
So instead of doing research for the sake of research—and by the way, there’s always value in pure academic research—but it’s also critically important that as much as reasonably possible, research be linked to real commercial application, and that’s what we see you doing in the polytechnics.
As a result, your students graduate with the types of skills that Canadian employers are looking for. Today, polytechnics in Canada have over 11 000 students engaged in applied research for Canadian industry. More than 40 000 are enrolled in 225 apprenticeship and skilled trades programs, and you have more than 26 000 international students, some of whom I met here today from India, Brazil, China and elsewhere, and many of whom will go on to, we hope, successful and rewarding careers here in Canada.
Dave mentioned the ambitious and fundamental immigration reforms we’ve been making. I was Canada’s longest-serving Minister of Immigration during a period of five years. And one of the things about which I am proudest was the introduction of a new dedicated immigration program for foreign students who graduate from Canadian colleges and universities. And I just want to advertise that, because still not enough people know about it.
I still run into the odd university president who says to me, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get foreign students permanent residency in Canada.” And I sort of say, “Doh, that’s been possible now for five years through the Canadian Experience Class.” So you get the two-year degree or diploma in Canada and one year of skilled work, you’re welcome to apply for and obtain permanent residency in the best country in the world, and we’ll process that quickly in a matter of months rather than the years that it used to take. So please spread the word to your fellow foreign students on polytechnic campuses here at SAIT and around the country.
Every year, polytechnics produce more than 58 000 graduates who are ready for the job market. They have the skills to find practical business solutions and to help companies grow. It’s not surprising that about 90 percent of polytechnic students—I think it’s 95 percent here at SAIT—find work within six months of graduation and in the vast majority of cases work for which they have been trained.
Matching students’ training with employer needs is an approach that obviously works. It works for the student. It works for our economy. And it just makes a lot of sense. Instead of undertaking research, as I said, for the sake of it, polytechnic students are doing research and development that is in demand. Matching students with solutions, with employers and businesses that have problems is a win/win for everyone.
Now students here at SAIT designed a new computer system to help, as I saw upstairs, Avalon Master Builder, which operates in my constituency of Calgary Southeast, upgrade their Net Zero Energy Home Discovery 4.
I also saw students at George Brown who helped SOS Customer Services develop a crane that collapses to fit in a service elevator to reduce costs compared with using large cranes on construction sites for these glass exteriors. And I can—given the massive construction that we see with those kinds of structures—I can see that as being something of incredible green commercial interest.
Students at Seneca helped Multisolve company develop a safe, environmentally-friendly lubricant to remove asphalt from construction equipment more easily.
And students at Conestoga invented the smart broom, which I’ve just tried out, and which helps curlers by measuring sweeps per second and can send that data instantly to a coach’s smart phone. And what could be more Canadian—(laughter)—than a high tech application for curlers? I think that’s just fantastic.
I could spend my entire time here going through all of these demand-driven, industry-driven initiatives, but I think we’re both convinced that they work.
And the federal government is doing what it can to support this applied research and the skills development, which we need for the future.
And look at Canada from the 30 000-foot perspective. You know, since the global economic downturn, we have seen the strongest job creation record of any of the major developed economies in the world—over 1.1 million net new jobs created since the end of the downturn. Ninety percent of those full-time jobs, overwhelmingly in good paying occupations and in the private sector. And there are now more Canadians working, or more people working in Canada, than at any time in our economic history.
In addition to that, we see that we’re on the cusp of a huge boom in our commodities and extractive resource industries, which entails tens of billions of dollars of construction and infrastructure, in addition to which, of course, we have the best-educated population in the world with the highest percentage of citizens with post-secondary education.
We have the lowest taxes at the federal level since 1964, and as my colleague Minister Flaherty underscored the other day, we are set to balance the federal budget within the next 18 months, be the first major developed economy to have done so. We have a lower debt and deficit than virtually all of our major developed economic competitors.
And we are in very exciting ways expanding the horizons of Canada as an export-driven economy. We’ve always been about exports, but for too long, we have been too dependent on one primary export market, that to our south, which means that Canada has been uniquely vulnerable to economic fluctuations in the United States. This is why it is existentially important for our economic future that we broaden and diversify our export markets. That’s been one of the single achievements of Prime Minister Harper’s government with the negotiation, successful completion of 13 free trade agreements in the past six years. And now with the signing of the Canada-Europe Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, we are on the cusp of virtually tariff-free access to 28 developed countries, which represent a developed consumer market of 500 million people. We will be the only jurisdiction on the planet that has preferential, virtually tariff-free access to the 500 million in the European Union and the 300 million people in the United States. We are at the hub of the global economy, and we’re not done yet as we continue to pursue export markets in Asia.
So you add all of this together, and what you get is a picture of a country, of an economy that we hope and believe—and according to most of the projections from the International Monetary Fund, of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development—is on the cusp of leading the developed world in growth. In fact, we already are.
And did you know that Canada, according to Forbes Magazine, is now the best place in the world in which to start a new business? And oh, by the way, the World Economic Forum says we have the most stable and reliable financial institutions.
Folks, the story is simple: we’ve got a lot going for us. Oh, and one last thing. We’re one of the only developed countries in the world that actually has a functioning immigration system. One that we’re also improving so that we attract people who have the skills that are relevant to our labour market and to the economy of the future rather than having newcomers arrive and face unemployment or underemployment, an issue that our students from Red River College are addressing.
So that’s the good news. The bad news is that we probably won’t have enough people to fill the opportunities of this robust future economy, and that’s partly just common sense. It’s based on the big demographic shifts we’ve all known have been coming for a long time as the baby boomers begin to retire. The next year will be the first year in Canada’s demographic history when more people leave the labour market than enter it, more boomers retire than young people who enter the workforce.
So you’ve got a shrinking labour force, but an expanding economy, and something’s got to give. Now some people say oh, don’t worry about, just solve that through immigration. Would that it could be so. But for us to just maintain the current average age of our population through immigration would require that we quadruple immigration levels from what are already historic highs at a quarter of a million a year to over a million permanent residents per year, which is just practically—it’s just implausible. Canadians know that we just can’t—don’t have the capacity to—integrate at the level of basic infrastructure, let alone socially integrate a million newcomers a year.
So what we have to do is to be a whole lot smarter, smarter in the immigrants who we select so that engineers who immigrate to Canada actually get to work as engineers instead of working the night shift in convenience stores, so that physicians who immigrate to Canada can actually get their license to practise rather than cleaning hotel rooms. So we need to maximize the opportunity of newcomers who arrive here. And that’s what our new immigration system will allow us to do.
We’ve already massively improved the geographic distribution of immigrants across the country. Back before our government came to office, 80 percent of immigrants settled in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, even though that’s where a lot of the best job opportunities did not exist. Now, we have tripled immigration to the Prairie provinces, quadrupled it in Saskatchewan, for example, tripled it in Alberta, doubled it in Atlantic Canada, and as I say, are doing a much better job of linking newcomers with employers who are selecting people whose skills they need.
But we also have to be a whole lot smarter in our own domestic policies around education and skills development. And let me say that, for example, last month the OECD issued a report which indicates that Canada, very disturbingly, is sliding down the scale of developed countries when it comes to education in the stem disciplines, in sciences and maths, for example. We are falling behind other developed countries, which raises some very profound questions for our education system.
Similarly, you know, my view is that for years politicians and bureaucrats, the political elites, have made decisions about allocating scarce public resources in higher education in disciplines that don’t necessarily link well to the labour market of the future.
What do I mean by that? Well, most of the politicians and bureaucrats did post-secondary, academic, university education. And for whatever reason, I think it’s not a coincidence that that’s where the lion’s share of the public investment in post-secondary education went. Starting 30 or 40 years ago, we began to diminish, almost to the point of irrelevance, the availability of vocational and technical training at the secondary school level in our provinces. Provinces started saying, under pressure from interest groups, for someone to teach in a high school, they have to have a degree from a teachers’ college, a certificate from a teachers’ college. Well, the kind of guys that used to teach shop and welding in our vocational high schools aren’t likely to spend a year or two to go and take a teacher’s diploma. Consequently, spending decisions were moved away from vocational and technical schools.
Only one percent of secondary students in the province of Ontario are enrolled in vocational or technical programs, for example, technical schools.
And so I last week met with my provincial counterparts, ministers of education, to encourage them to think about, to use a cliché, a paradigm shift, a different way of thinking about investing in education, to recreate the tradition of vocational and technical education available in the secondary school system and to focus their investments on post-secondary education increasingly on the practical and applied sciences and research, like that done at polytechnic institutes across the country.
Let me be clear. Heaven forbid I should trample on provincial jurisdiction in our country. I recognize provinces—et je reconnais entièrement que les provinces sont responsables de l’éducation puisque notre Constitution leur accorde cette compétence. Cela étant dit, il y a une union économique – un des principes de notre Constitution – qui dit qu’il faut favoriser la mobilité, et je crois qu’il y a une responsabilité du gouvernement fédéral d’encourager les politiques pour augmenter la productivité de notre économie.
Donc, c’est la raison pour laquelle j’ai signalé à mes homologues provinciaux, il y a une semaine, l’importance d’augmenter la mobilité du marché du travail au Canada et l’éducation dans les métiers spécialisés, comme les formations offertes dans les polytechniques du Canada.
So we recognize the provinces are responsible for education, but guess what, the federal government pays for a lot of that. We pay for it through something called the Canada Social Transfer, billions a year. We’ve increased transfers to provinces by $20 billion a year. We spend billions on skills development for groups of our population who are under-represented in the workforce—Aboriginals, young Canadians, people with disabilities, older workers in need of retraining, newcomers, immigrants. We’ve quadrupled settlement funding for them, including job search skills and language proficiency.
So we are making a lot of investments at the federal level, and I think with those investments we have a right to say that provincial education programs should be finding ways to develop students with skills that are actually needed in the labour market of the future. And all of us have to do a better job of informing young Canadians about the prospects of different vocational decisions that they’re going to make, which is something that our government committed to do in Economic Action Plan 2013, in our budget.
We will be releasing some very interesting information that young people can access through social media to find out that, for example, if they go and become a welder through a place like SAIT, they’re on a career path to potentially earn three times as much as if they go and get a BA in political science at a place like the University of Calgary. And I always say in Ottawa we already have a very distinctive surplus of people with political science degrees. We could use a few more welders in Parliament as well.
So I think these are big and important issues, as is the question of improving our apprenticeship training system. I know polytechnic students are enrolled in apprenticeship programs across Canada, and I know that many of you are facing the very same obstacles that other apprentices are facing.
Journeymen/apprenticeship ratios are too high, especially in Ontario and Quebec, making it difficult for many would-be tradesmen and women to get placements. And apprenticeship requirements are different in different provinces, making it difficult to move to another province to complete your apprenticeship. And I want you to know that our government is fixated on this problem, and we are no longer going to sit idly by and let it get worse.
Last week, in my meeting with provincial counterparts, I raised these challenges and said we have to have harmonization in the apprenticeship system across the country, and provinces must break down some of these antiquated, irrelevant policies of labour protectionism that are, for example, represented in these very strict ratios.
Our government has also invested significantly in incentivizing young people, people in general to go into apprenticeships for the skilled trades with the Apprenticeship Incentive Grant and the Apprenticeship Completion Grant, together representing about a $4,000 benefit to people who go into those programs, and a hiring credit for employers. Polytechnics Canada suggests we make that available at the back end because we don’t have enough of our approximately 340 000 enrolled apprentice students actually completing their programs. Only about 50 percent of those who enroll in apprenticeship programs go on to complete.
And one of the reasons for this, I believe, is that there is a huge opportunity cost for apprentices to leave their employment to do their formal block classroom training at places like SAIT and NAIT. They typically have to go on Employment Insurance. Some employers, to their credit, will invest in, will indenture those apprentices and pay them through that period, but not enough.
And that’s why yesterday, in a speech I delivered at the B.C. Business Summit, I said we have to see a greater commitment by Canadian employers, by the private sector in the apprentice system and in skills development in general.
Let me tell you something that I find a little bit disturbing. Canada is at the very top of the developed world when it comes to investment in skills development and post-secondary education. That’s the 34 most industrialized economies. But we are at the bottom of the list when it comes to private sector employer investments in skills development and education. That simply has to change.
And right here in Calgary, I can tell you every time I get off the plane, I’ve got employers rushing up to me saying, Jason, you’ve got to fix this skills shortage problem, it’s killing us. We can’t meet the orders we’ve got. We just don’t have enough people with skills.
And my question to them is, first of all, what have you done on wages because on a national level, wages have barely kept pace with inflation, which is hardly indicative of a tight labour market. And what have you done on skills development? What are you doing to indenture and invest in and support those apprentice students as they do their formal training?
You know, I’m an Albertan, and I don’t want to be partisan, but I’m a Conservative. I believe in free markets. I believe that they’re the best way to generate wealth and increase people’s standard of living. But businesses shouldn’t be looking to government to somehow subsidize or solve the challenges that they’re facing dealing with expansion and labour shortages. Businesses need to respond with market solutions to what is a labour market problem, and the one primary lever at the disposal of employers, a market solution is wages and salaries and benefits because those send signals to young people that they will respond to in terms of the vocational and training choices that they make. And businesses need to demonstrate, again, through a market mechanism of greater investment in skills training and apprenticeships.
Now I should also give great credit to many employers here in Alberta and around the country for becoming more active partners in sponsoring programs and infrastructure and projects like today’s here at SAIT and at polytechnics across the country. There’s a great emerging relationship, but we could do, and should do, so much more. So my message to the private sector is you’ve got a willing partner in the federal government in greater labour mobility. We’ve done reforms to the Employment Insurance program, for example. We’ve incentivized apprenticeships. We fixed our immigration system. We are looking at additional reforms, as suggested to us by Polytechnics Canada. But we need to see employers with more skin in the game.
That’s one of the reasons we proposed this Canada Job Grant, which would leverage a larger private sector investment in skills development and job training where employers could nominate an individual who they are confident has the aptitude to work, at the end of which training they would guarantee that person a job in principle.
That’s what the Job Grant idea is. It’s taking a little bit of the funds we currently give provinces for skills development programs, some of which are good, some of which underperform. And it’s getting employers involved, increasing their investment with a guaranteed job at the end of it. I think it makes a lot of sense and hope the provinces will agree with me on that.
Let me close by saying that this country is standing on the cusp of just a remarkable opportunity, this part of Canada in particular. And we’ve got our fiscal house in order. We’ve got the tax situation right. We’ve been lightening the regulatory burden on employers. We’ve fixed what was a broken immigration system in many respects. We are expanding our export and trade markets. We invest massively in education in this country. We’ve got so much right, but this is the one last big piece for Canada to really lead the world.
And it’s going to require the full involvement of educators, of unions, employers, provincial and the federal governments all working together in the same direction. And I think there are other countries that have done this in admiral ways, which is why I suggested to my provincial colleagues last week that we take a joint trip to study, for example, the dual training system in Germany. It’s not perfectly applicable to Canada, but it is a totally different paradigm with radically better results in terms of employment and a labour market.
The unemployment rate for young Germans is 7.5 percent. For young Canadians, it’s 13 percent. Yet we have twice as many young Canadians enrolled in post-secondary academic university programs as they do in Germany. What’s the difference? The difference is unions, employers, educators, state and federal governments all encouraging young people from essentially their junior high school years on to experience real practical skills in the workplace for which they are compensated, and supporting in all sorts of ways those young people developing their potential in ways that are really relevant in the economy.
In this area, we can do much better. SAIT and the polytechnics are leading the way. They have our absolute support as we prepare to fuel Canada’s prosperity for the future.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
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