DATE/DATE:
November 7, 2013, 12:30 p.m.
LOCATION/ENDROIT:
Room 718, South Building, Metro Toronto Convention Centre, 222 Bremner Boulevard, Toronto, Ontario
SUBJECT/SUJET:
Minister of Employment and Social Development and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney Delivers a Keynote Speech at the Skills and Post-Secondary Education Summit.
Hon. Jason Kenney: Well, thank you so much, and good afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone. I see there’s a few media here. I’m surprised. I thought all the fun in town was down at city hall. But I’ll do my best to be entertaining, talking about labour markets and the skills gap.
But before I begin my speech on the topic of your conference, and as the Minister of Multiculturalism, I would first like to discuss a bill that was recently tabled in the Quebec National Assembly.
So before I begin my comments on the subject of your conference, I wanted first to speak to you in my capacity as Canada’s Minister for Multiculturalism in respect of a bill just tabled at the National Assembly in Quebec, the name of which is so long I won’t bother reading it. The Charter affirming the values of state secularism and religious neutrality and of equality between women and men and providing a framework for accommodation requests.
So ladies and gentlemen, I just wanted to say in my capacity as Minister for Multiculturalism that Canada is considered a model to the world because of our successful approach to pluralism, to unity in diversity, to being a welcoming society. Yes, we have certain normative values, customs, cultures and institutions such as the equal treatment of men and women, such as religious freedom and the peaceful, nonviolent resolution of differences in our society. And there is an expectation that newcomers should make an effort to integrate successfully into Canadian society while there’s an obligation on us as a host society to be welcoming and to create equality of opportunity.
And that’s why when I was Minister of Immigration, we underscored, for example, that when people were taking the Citizenship Oath, they should do so publicly. It’s a public declaration of their public loyalty to their fellow citizens, their country and their sovereign, and that’s why we said that people should, when they’re engaged with the state, show their faces. That should not be considered an unreasonable imposition.
But at the same time, let us be clear. Freedom of religion is a universal principle and it is one that we protect and defend here in Canada. A Canadian is no less a citizen because through their religious observance they may wear a hijab or a turban, a kippah or a cross. They are all equally Canadian and have an equal right to participate fully in the public life of our society.
And that is why I am concerned with the content of the bill introduced in the National Assembly today. It does not have, apparently, the support of the majority of the members of the Quebec National Assembly and therefore may not become law.
However, I can inform you that we will be closely monitoring the outcome of this legislation. Indeed, if the bill, as currently framed, seeking to ban certain Canadians from participation in public life becomes law, we will closely analyze it—and if it is found to violate our Constitution and our constitutionally protected freedom of religion, we will challenge it. We will defend … we will strongly defend the fundamental Canadian freedom of religion and association against any effort to encroach upon those fundamental constitutional rights. (Applause.)
And as I say, the Government of Canada’s responsibility is to make sure that everyone who lives in our country—who shares our values, whatever their background, whatever their race, whatever their religion—feels at home in this country and has equal opportunity to be proud and fully contributing Canadians. And no one should ever be forced to choose between their faith and a job in the public sector.
So let me then turn to the subject that you’re discussing here today and begin by commending the Conference Board of Canada for this Skills and Post-Secondary Education Summit. You are addressing what I think is the biggest economic challenge facing our country. And it is a challenge I will be taking up tomorrow in a meeting with the Forum of Labour Market Ministers—myself and my counterparts from 13 provinces and territories.
I will be calling on them to take collective action to better align post-secondary education with our labour market, to reform the apprenticeship system, to move forward with foreign credential recognition, to increase labour mobility across Canada, and to do a better job of integrating new Canadians into our workforce.
My overriding objective as the Jobs Minister is to address the paradox in our economy of too many unemployed Canadians in an economy that has too many jobs without workers. This is a pivotal time for our country. We should be proud that Canada came through the global economic downturn with more strength and vigour than virtually any other developed economy in the world. We had a shorter and shallower recession than any of the G7 countries, than most of the developed countries. And we’ve had the strongest labour market growth since that time with the creation of nearly 1.1 million net new jobs, overwhelmingly full-time, private‑sector jobs in good-paying occupations.
And the future looks bright. Just three weeks ago, we signed the agreement in principle for the Canada–European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, which, it is estimated, will add some $14 billion to our Gross Domestic Product in the short term with the creation of at least 80,000 net new jobs, increasing the average … in income … the income of the average Canadian household by about $1,000.
And that’s just really the tip of the iceberg. It will bring Canada’s products to a consumer … developed consumer market of half a billion people, and with our preferential access to the U.S. market, that means only Canada … only Canadian exporters will have access for their goods and services to a developed market of over 800 million people. It will bring to 43 the numbers of countries with whom we have essentially tariff-free access.
So the future is bright in terms of diversifying our export markets, and of course we have the huge advantage of one of the world’s best-educated populations and the great blessing of our natural resources. In fact, here in Canada, hundreds of major resource projects worth an estimated $650 billion could come on stream over the next decade alone, from hydroelectricity and mining to oil sands and liquefied natural gas.
But as things stand now, we are not actually prepared to seize the opportunities that are presented to us because of the paradox of too many Canadians without jobs in an economy of too many jobs without workers.
Now you know the challenge. First of all, let’s be clear about this. This is a nuanced debate, and I’m sure you’re drilling down on that nuance here at this conference. On the one hand, the aggregate labour market information—the data that’s extracted from Statistics Canada surveys—tells us that there’s not really a skill or labour shortage in Canada. The labour prices tell us that they’ve barely kept pace with inflation overall in our economy, which is not indicative of a tight labour market or labour or skills shortages. And I acknowledge that. That’s a reality.
It’s also a reality that Canadian employers spend less, far less than the average in the developed world on skills development and job training while our governments spend significantly more than the average in those important areas. And yet … and yet every single employer with whom I meet in every part of the country, every sector council, every industry and business organization tells me that the single … that either one of the most important, if not the most important challenge which they are facing today is that of the skills shortage. Many call it a crisis.
The Ontario Employers Skill Survey conducted by you, by the Conference Board, estimated that this province is losing out on as much as $24.3 billion in economic activity and $3.7 billion in provincial tax revenue annually just because employers can’t find people with the skills they need to grow.
And in Quebec, based on Canadian Federation of Independent Business data, 290 000 jobs were vacant even though, strangely enough, the unemployment rate was 8.2 percent.
And the … according to the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, who I’m sure is represented here today, over the next 10 years, Canada’s labour market will need approximately 1.5 million workers because of our economic growth and, of course, the big demographic shifts.
This shouldn’t be. You know, one of the things that frustrates me in the debate about the skills gap is that really it’s not a debate. There are parallel monologues. On the one hand, you have certain interest groups and certain economists and commentators, political figures saying no, there is really no skills shortage or labour shortage, it’s all just a myth created by businesses to justify underpaying workers. And on the other hand, you have all of the employers saying no, this is a … either an acute problem for us today or a huge problem that we will be encountering in the future. They can’t both be right. And the truth is we need to create—and I hope that fora like this can do this—we need to create an informed, engaged, real national dialogue about this because—I don’t care whether you’re in a labour union or whether you’re a small and medium-sized employer, a major mining company, an academic economist—all of us have to sit down together—provinces, the federal government, unions, employers—to hammer out this issue. We cannot afford to get this wrong. And that’s the message I want to convey to you today. It is too important.
The Canadian construction sector says they’ll need 319 000 new workers before the end of the decade. The mining industry says 145 000 by 2020. The petroleum sector estimates 130 000 workers by the end of the decade. The supply chain sector estimate a shortage of 357 000 workers between now and 2020. Skills Canada tells us that we’re going to need 1 million skilled trade workers by 2020. And the Canadian Chamber of Commerce listed skill shortages as one of Canada’s top 10 barriers to competitiveness. Its survey showed that a third of the owners of small and medium-sized businesses identified skill shortages as a constraint on their current growth.
So again, the aggregate labour market information is inadequate. It is not giving us a full, nuanced, accurate depiction of what’s really going on in our economy. And I admit that as the Minister responsible for our labour market information at the federal level, we must do a much better job.
Don Drummond and a number of other highly recognized Canadians did an excellent report for my department back in 2009, and I can tell you that my ministry, the newly named Employment and Social Development Canada, is doing its part to implement as many of those recommendations as possible. But I will be talking tomorrow to the provinces, an ongoing discussion with the private sector about how we can all come to the table with better and more accurate labour market information so we can figure out what’s really going on out there.
So, and I’m also pleased to tell you … that’s why I’m here to tell you that our government will be supporting the Conference Board of Canada’s new Centre for Skills and Post-Secondary Education. The Centre will examine Canada’s advanced skills and education challenges, make recommendations on improving post-secondary education funding and credential recognition. It will also provide us with more information on the current situation that we are facing.
So this is a call to action for business leaders and for educational institutions, universities, colleges, career colleges and skilled trades programs, but also all levels of government. The status quo is not good enough.
The theme of this conference is especially appropriate considering the situation. We must cultivate talent in order to make our country competitive. Post-secondary education is vital to Canada’s economic growth and future prosperity.
Post-secondary enrollment in Canada is at an all-time high, and college and university education is more accessible than ever before. I know that some of my friends at the Canadian Federation of Students say otherwise, but the truth is that student indebtedness has not gone up, and in fact, it is relatively low by historic standards.
Since we formed government seven years ago, nearly 2 million Canadians benefited—I’m going to just list for you some of the investments that the federal government is making in PSE. Over 3 million benefited from the Canada Education Savings Grant, and half a million children received the Canada Learning Bond. As a matter of fact, the federal government invests over $10 billion annually to support students, research and infrastructure funding and transfers to provinces for post-secondary education. Much of that money goes directly to students. In the last year, close to 450 000 students received Canada Student Loans administered by my department.
In addition to loans, there are Canada Student Grants. In 2011, over 330 000 students received financial assistance from the Loans Program in the form of non-repayable grants, for a total of almost $650 million. These grants go to low- and middle‑income students, students with disabilities and students with dependants, making it easier for them to pay for their post-secondary education.
In 2011, Canada ranked first in overall PSE amongst the OECD countries, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, with over 50 percent of adults aged 25 to 64 having university or longer college credentials. That’s far above the OECD average of 30 percent. But we have to ask ourselves: Is Canada’s enormous investment in post-secondary education achieving adequate results?
Many believe that we’re underperforming in making the best of our human capital. A recent report by CIBC World Markets says many students aren’t getting a good return on their university investment because they’re not going into the right fields. Right now, we have an awful lot of college and university grads without jobs, despite the evidence of skill shortages in many sectors of our economy. And although it’s overwhelmingly evident that one’s chosen field of study has a direct bearing on job success, students have, as a matter of fact, gravitated toward the certificates and degrees. They have not, rather … they have not gravitated towards the certificates and degrees that increasingly offer the best outcomes in terms of income and often job satisfaction.
And that’s one of the paradoxes that we are dealing with. That’s one of the reasons why our government plans to provide more information on the job prospects and benefits of working, for example, in skilled trades, science, technology, engineering and mathematics in order to promote education in this high‑demand fields. And we all have to do more of course to encourage young women in particular to pursue vocations in those stem disciplines.
Students need to have the relevant information to make informed choices. They should be aware of the signals being sent by the labour market. You know, as I recall from memory, a briefing I received recently suggested that someone who completes their journeyman program as a welder is likely to make three times more than someone who gets a BA in Political Science, and Lord knows we have enough of those up in Ottawa.
Market data show that we have enough psychologists, sociologists and bachelors of the liberal arts.
But there are plenty of opportunities for people who can build, fix or maintain things. We do need electricians, plumbers, welders, pipefitters and engineers. And perhaps more importantly, we need to begin revaluing these technical vocations.
By the way, I stand before you as someone … I plead guilty … I studied humanities and majored in philosophy. And I actually am a huge advocate of the humanities, personally. I wish every young person would have an opportunity to have a good, solid, broad liberal arts program. But the truth is, at least we need to give young people the information so they can make informed choices. And I think we are not doing an adequate job in that respect.
Provincial governments need to realize that choices that were made in the 1970s and ‘80s to diminish vocational education have had very significant impacts. Forty years ago, most high schools had vocational training available in Canada. There were … and today, those opportunities are very few and far between.
Research done at York University in the 1990s found that the number of individual technology courses taken by secondary school students in Ontario had dropped from nearly half a million in 1973 to a quarter of a million in 1996. I have not seen more recent statistics, but I think the number continues to decline.
And the number of vocational program diplomas issued by Quebec fell by 117 000 in 1976 to 5 000 in 1972 (sic). This drop is significant, and we are feeling the impact of it now.
So let’s look at … I think one of the things we need to do is exercise … you know, we’re Canadians, one of our national traits is supposedly humility. So let’s be humble about what we’ve gotten wrong. Let’s perhaps pull the camera back and look at other systems, at other countries that are doing a better job of preparing young people for the labour market.
Let’s look, for example, at Germany. I understand you have a prominent visitor from Germany addressing the conference this week. I am going to be recommending tomorrow to my provincial counterparts that we embark on a joint mission to study the German Mittelstand dual training system and perhaps as well the apprenticeship training system in the United Kingdom which has seen significant improvements over recent years.
Because you know the numbers, I’m sure. In Germany, half as many young people enter post-secondary university academic institutions as is the case in Canada, and yet the youth unemployment rate in Germany is 7.5 percent, versus 13 percent in Canada. Is there a direct correlation? Well, of course, the answer to that is complex, but one thing I know—far more young Germans are working in good-paying jobs than young Canadians, in large measure because of the fully integrated dual training system which approaches young people at junior high school age through business … through collaboration between employers, unions, educators, the state and federal governments, which provide an integrated approach that encourages them to get practical work experience through co-op and apprenticeship programs.
And you know, we have to rebut this notion that this leads to dead-end jobs. Many of those young Germans who in their teens go into co-op and apprenticeship programs end up becoming journeymen in the crafts and trades, making very good incomes. Many of them go on later to take formal post-secondary education to further upgrade their skills and become professionals. So the trades are not the end of someone’s … the development of someone’s human capital. In many cases, they can be seen as the beginning. And I think, again, we need to send that message positively to young Canadians.
We also need to revalue the … and I say this again as a personal advocate of the humanities, we need to revalue the stem disciplines. In the last decade, university enrollment in Canada has skyrocketed from 850 000 students in 2001 to 1.2 million last year—an increase of 380,000 students. However, in the science, technology, engineering and math fields, enrollment has increased by only 50 000 students over the same time. In the last decade, we’ve seen a 220 000-person increase in the number of women enrolling in universities in Canada; but of that increase, only 15 000 more women were enrolled in these high‑demand stem fields. These fields used to make up 24 percent of university enrollment in Canada, but that’s now down to about 20 percent.
At the very same time that students are turning away from science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, employment in these sectors is growing at 2.5 percent a year—double the rate of growth of overall employment in Canada.
The Canadian Occupational Projection System states there will be over 1.1 million job openings in the science, technology, engineering, mathematics fields in the coming decade. This speaks to the very heart of the reforms we need to make. Too many students are turning away from the very fields in which they may be most likely to find a good job. And this is particularly important, given that women are making up 60 percent of students enrolled in our universities. We must urgently do a better job of attracting them to the stem fields, and I think that process has to begin in high school. And women … young women are no less sensitive to market signals. They need to know as well what the remunerative possibilities are as well as the quality of life possibilities in technical vocations as well as in, for example, the humanities.
And so the numbers do tell a discouraging story. Not enough young Canadians are pursuing careers in the skilled trades. Only 32 percent of high school students say they would even consider a career in the skilled trades, meaning that obviously fewer actually pursue it. But even if high school students want to pursue a career in the skilled trades, they often don’t know where to turn. The requirements to enter these trades have evolved significantly as technology has evolved. Today’s car mechanics are expected to be able to use sophisticated computerized diagnostic systems, while construction electricians, for example, need to understand energy management systems and so-called smart buildings. How many high school students who want to become an electrician would intuitively think to have this level of computer science experience? So we need to ensure that students know exactly what training is required for what career when they face these important decisions.
Let me now turn my attention for a moment to the need for fundamental reform of our apprenticeship system because, again, we get the kids involved, they’re interested, how do they actually pursue not just enrolling in an apprenticeship program, but completing it because we have hundreds of thousands of people enrolled in apprenticeship programs, but fewer than half of them … half of those people actually complete them.
This is an area in which the provinces hold almost all of the levers, and they need to do better, with respect. There are great inconsistencies across Canada’s 13 different apprenticeship systems, and employers who want to recruit apprentices are facing high journeymen-to-apprenticeship ratios which I believe are a vestige of 1970s style labour protectionism from a different time that does not reflect the demographic reality of today.
More can and must be done to remove unnecessary blockages in our apprenticeship system, especially as we see the older master journeymen beginning a wave of retirement. I was just talking to someone from the Ottawa hydro company this morning who showed me his … on a chart, how a huge chunk of his labour force of electricians is about to retire in the next two or three years, and they won’t be there to be journeymen to teach the electricians of the future.
And I have been very precise, by the way, about one of the challenges we have is the lack of mobility for apprentices and labour mobility in general in Canada. How ridiculous is it that someone who started an apprenticeship program in Ontario who decides to move to Manitoba cannot port their hours with them? They have to start all over again. And why is it that the provinces signed on to an agreement for interprovincial labour mobility and the reciprocal recognition of credentials two decades ago in the context of the Agreement on Internal Trade, and yet we continue to have ridiculous rigidities in labour mobility within Canada. This is supposed to be an economic union. Yes, we recognize provincial competence, responsibility for education, but we also recognize that we should … How ridiculous is it in the 21st century that we have provinces, frankly including this one, who are today adding new rigidities to prevent labour mobility within Canada?
Let’s again, pull the camera back. Let’s look at the fact that in the 24 member states of the European Union … excuse me, 27 member states of the European Union with 24 languages, many of those countries have a history of warfare and conflict, and yet you can move as a dentist from Portugal to Poland, and in principle, practise the next day. You can move as a welder from Romania to Ireland and be certified in principle the next day, but you can’t do it between Ontario and Quebec. This is absurd, and these kinds of rigidities have to end. We need full labour mobility so Canadians can go to where the jobs are to pursue their potential. (Applause.)
And I promise I’m getting close to the end here … and we must do a much better job of helping new Canadians, newcomers achieve their potential in our labour market. You know … as you know, I was the longest-serving Minister of Immigration I think in our history, and I … I become emotional when I think about the number of people I met who broke down in front of me and told me their stories about how they left their country of origin, took a big risk on Canada because they believed in the promise of this country that they would be able to realize their potential and do better by their families and their kids, but only to find and when they got here they became trapped in a cycle of survival jobs while their skills atrophied and they felt a sense of shame in front of their own families—coming home, working two and three minimum-wage jobs just to put food on the table.
This is, frankly, unjust. It’s just plain wrong. It’s unethical for us to invite highly educated professionals from around the world, saying that we need immigration because our population is aging, only for them to face often impenetrable barriers towards the recognition of their professional or skills credentials here in Canada. There are a lot of reasons for that, and there continues to be, in my judgment, in some of the licensed professions, an attitude of labour protectionism and unnecessary barriers.
We are working on that with the provinces. My … our government has invested $50 million through something called the Pan-Canadian Framework for Foreign Credential Recognition to get the professional licensing bodies around the table to hammer out a streamlined national approach to credential recognition, which hopefully we can also use in the future in our immigration selection decisions, in the new, fast and flexible economic immigration system. And yet the challenge continues.
So we, the federal government, have to do a radically better job of selecting people who actually have skills that are relevant to the Canadian standard, and that’s one place where we have fallen down in the past. And we are doing a significantly better job through our reformed immigration system to select people who can work at their skill level when they get to Canada. Is it too much to ask that the people who we invite here as engineers should have a reasonable shot as working as engineers rather than being cab drivers? It shouldn’t be too much to ask. And so we all must do more in this respect.
There’s a lot of work to be done to get this stuff right, but it is absolutely essential to our future. Again, best fiscal position in the G7. Going to have a balanced federal budget in 2015. Lowest federal taxes in 40 years. The only country in the world that will soon have tariff-free access to the markets of both the United States and the European Union. Trade and export market diversification. Huge natural resources with hundreds of billions of dollars of pending capital investments. The best-educated population in the world. One of the best-functioning immigration systems, which is improving with these reforms. What’s not to like about this country?
We’ve got it going for us. (Applause.) And I don’t care what … where your position on the political spectrum, doesn’t matter whether you’re labour or business, academic or practical, we have an amazing opportunity here. We just need to get this part of it right. We need to ensure that our young people have the skills to seize the opportunity of the future.
I want to thank the Conference Board and all of you for being dedicated to that. Thanks very much. (Applause.)
