DATE: 
February 10, 2014 – 9:15 a.m.

LOCATION: 
Canadian Museum of Nature, 240 McLeod St., Ottawa, Ontario

SUBJECT: 

Minister of Employment and Social Development and Minister for Multiculturalism Jason Kenney delivers the Keynote Address at the Youth and Digital Skills Symposium.

Hon. Jason Kenney: Thank you Peter, I think. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, everyone, and welcome to your national capital. Yes, I often get confused with the British cyclist Jason Kenny—slightly different body shapes. I should take a good example from him. By the way, Canada won another gold, apparently just a couple of hours ago, so go Team Canada! We’re owning the podium in Russia. This is great.

I want to welcome you all again to your national capital for those of you who are visiting and for those from away. I know our guest speaker is from Berkeley. I went to college at USF and did some courses in Berkeley. In fact, I did a 10-week intensive Latin course from which I’m still recovering. I think I didn’t get any sleep for 10 weeks. Welcome to Canada. Welcome to the cold. I hope you’ll survive it.

Thank you to all of you for putting together this important forum on really an essential issue for the future of our economy on youth and digital skills. I’m not speaking for long, but I just wanted to try to situate your conversations today in the context of the Canadian economy—some of its current and future challenges—with the caveat that, of course for those of you who are not Canadian, in our country as in most federations, education is primarily a local and provincial-level responsibility.

While we at the federal level observe what’s going on in terms of gaps in our educational system, there’s not an awful lot we can do about it directly. Our relationship to the post-secondary and primary education systems is sometimes the role of a funder but not very much the role of setting policy. 

Our relationship to the remedy side of this is largely attenuated, but there are things we can and are seeking to do, in part trying to use the federal bully pulpit, as it were, to raise awareness about the need to focus on digital literacy and preparing young Canadians for the workforce of the future.

First of all, we are very fortunate, as was alluded to, to have a relatively vibrant economy and a relatively strong labour force. We’ve had relatively strong labour force growth since the global economic downturn, certainly at the high end of the OECD and of the G7. However, we continue to see challenges with youth unemployment as was mentioned and over 14 percent. In some regions, youth unemployment is much more problematic than that.

In the greater Toronto area, for example, over 25 percent of people between the ages of 15 and 25 say they want to work but can’t find jobs. Of course, underneath those numbers there’s the bigger and broader problem of youth underemployment. Many young Canadians—many of them with good, even post-secondary educations—who find themselves unemployed, perhaps in the service industry or in low-skilled employment that does not reflect their education or their potential.

We all are frustrated by this, particularly when we see the paradox that most Canadian industries and business organizations tell us that their biggest challenge right now and in the foreseeable future is that of skill shortages. In some places, it’s actually a problem of general labour shortages. 

A couple of weeks ago I was in southwestern Saskatchewan, where they are at full employment. Anyone who wants a job can find a job, and that is across the entire skills spectrum from unskilled farm labour to service jobs to trade jobs to highly skilled professions.

There are interesting things going on all across the economy that are relevant to digital literacy. One of the things I just recently learned is, of course, our farmers are becoming increasingly productive thanks in part to bioscience and improving better seeds and better seed technology, but also because … I grew up in the rural prairies when farm technology was pretty basic, mechanical stuff.

But now they have these $400,000 combines that are virtually run by computers.  When a part starts to go off in the combine as the farmer is harvesting, it automatically without his knowledge sends a wireless message to the dealer saying what the problem is and that a new part is needed, which is then delivered. This is the new world in which we’re operating, where a Saskatchewan grain farmer is essentially driving over his field at harvest time a computer-operated, complex piece of equipment that cost $400,000 that requires digital literacy to develop and to operate.

This is something that we need to convey—that many jobs, many occupations that we considered in the past to be low‑skilled actually require a high level of skills, including digital literacy and competency in maths and science. That is what we’re hearing right across the spectrum. I really do find this a paradox because we talk about the challenge of digital literacy amongst youth. 

I talk, for example, to the computer gaming industry. I don’t know if they’re represented here, but they’re constantly asking us to help facilitate the admission into Canada of highly skilled programmers from abroad through our Temporary Foreign Worker Program, which as you know is a politically sensitive subject. They tell us that they depend on the very specific skills of people from abroad which just don’t exist in Canada, and they need them just in time.

Entire enormous projects in which hundreds of people are employed depend on the right person. There may be two or three people in some of these areas who know precisely the kind of coding that’s required and they happen to live in France, the United States or somewhere else. I just find this remarkable—that we’ve got millions of young Canadian boys sitting at home playing computer games all day and yet none of them seem to want to go into computer programming for gaming as a vocation.

There seems … I mean, that seems really counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? That is to say that there’s a higher degree of digital literacy in the general sense amongst young people, and yet they’re not apparently converting that into a marketable skill in sufficient numbers. As you know, the information communications technology sector is comprised of more than 33 000 companies in Canada, mainly small enterprises.

It generates $155 billion in revenues and contributes more than $67 billion to our gross domestic product. Right now, the ICT industry’s unemployment rate is less than 3 percent—that is to say, full employment. ITAC, the Information Technology Association of Canada, says that by 2016—just two years from now—there will be 160 000 high‑paying jobs in that sector alone going unfilled.

Other emerging sectors that rely heavily on information and communications technology will add to that need. The fact that our country and our young people face such an opportunity is good news, but to fully take advantage of it we need to ensure that today’s youth have the skills required to fill these jobs. One of the most important ways to address this challenge is, of course, through our post-secondary education system.

As I said, this is an area where provincial governments control the levers which the federal government helps to fund, both through the student financing system but also thorough our Canada social transfer where we contribute about $3 billion a year to provincial post-secondary education programs. 

As most of you know, Canada ranks at the top of the developed world when it comes to post-secondary education, at least the frequency of it, with 50 percent of adults ages 25 to 64 having some form of PSE. That is compared to the OECD average of only 30 percent. The question is, what’s not right here? By the way, governments, the public sector in Canada invests more in education and skills development than any other country in the OECD.

Regrettably, the private sector in Canada invests almost less than any other country in the OECD on education and skills development. We’re making this huge public spend. We have a disproportionately large number of Canadians with post-secondary education. We are a highly educated population, and yet in many critical industries, not just ICT, we see very significant skills gaps developing.

Part of that, of course, is just a function of demography as the baby boomers retire and lower birth rates, meaning that we don’t have the same kind of population growth but we are maintaining very high levels of immigration—a quarter of a million new permanent residents a year, the highest relative levels in the developed world. 

I’ll tell you this. As a former Minister of Immigration, as wonderful and welcoming as this country is towards newcomers, as much as we need their talents I think there’s something wrong if we end up finding ourselves turning primarily or significantly even to overseas talent while leaving young Canadians out of the cycle of prosperity, out of the opportunities that they should have, frankly, first.

This is a really critical issue. Think about the social implications of this. If these trends continue and we continue to staff some of our most critical tech jobs with people coming from abroad, either on a temporary or permanent basis, and younger Canadians find themselves disproportionately unemployed or underemployed—I don’t like what that implies for social cohesion and inclusion in our society.

Right now we have simply too many college and university grads without jobs despite the evidence of skill shortages in many sectors, as I’ve said. In the last decade, university enrolment in Canada has skyrocketed from 850 000 students in 2001 to 1.2 million in 2011—an increase of nearly 400 000 students. However, in the science, technology, engineering and maths fields, enrolment has only increased over the same time by 50 000 students.

Everyone’s saying that’s the most critical area, and yet in relative terms it’s shrinking as a percentage of students entering PSE. In the last decade we’ve seen a 220 000‑person increase in the number of women enrolling in university, but out of that increase only 15 000 more women are enrolling in the STEM fields. These fields used to make up 24 percent of university enrolment in our country. That has now dropped to 20 percent.

At the very same time that students are turning away from the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, employment in those areas is growing at 2.5 percent a year. Again, there’s a real gap here. That growth rate, by the way, of 2.5 percent a year in the field is double the growth rate of general employment in Canada. The Canadian occupational projection system states there will be over 1.1 million job openings in the science, technology, engineering and maths fields in the coming decade.

This speaks to the very heart of the reforms we need to make. Students are turning away from the very fields in which they are most likely to be well employed and realize their potential. Now the search for remedies, and that’s what I hope to read your conference summation for, because frankly at the federal level the levers that we have are limited.

One thing that we announced in last year’s budget is a reallocation of some of the spending in my department towards programing that helps to provide young people with interesting and relevant information on labour market outcomes. We hope to be launching this early this year, where young people will be able to use, for example, wireless apps to figure out what the unemployment rates are in various occupations and sectors, what the income returns might be so at least they can have a little bit more objective information.

Much more needs to be done. I have invited my provincial counterparts who are responsible for human resources and skills development to visit Europe with me—particularly Germany, to examine their dual training system. When we think of the German system we often think of skilled trades apprentices, but in fact they’re doing I think an excellent job, arguably much better than Canada, in preparing young people at the secondary school level for jobs in the ICT sector through STEM disciplines as well.

They do so, of course, through a very integrated partnership between employers, unions, the state and federal governments. What I hope comes from your deliberations today are concrete suggestions that I can share with my provincial counterparts about how in your cutting-edge disciplines we can make young Canadians aware of the enormous potential that lies in these fields, and so that the enormous public resources that we are spending on education and skills development actually gets the bang for the buck that we need for young people and for our economic future.

Thank you very much and good luck for your deliberations today. I hope you get a chance … are you going to watch the Olympics on the side here a little bit?  It looks like it’s going to be a good one for Canada, so I hope that your conference has that same kind of sense of aspiration that our young people do in Sochi today. Thank you very much. Welcome. Thank you very much.

src:news.gc.ca