Canada's labour force needs a shakeup

I'm supporting prime minister Stephen Harper when he says he wants to remake the Canadian labour force.

We've misled a whole lot of Canadian youth when we told them — almost as a tenet of faith — that if they went to university and got a degree, that they would find rewarding careers to keep them employed longer, and pay them higher incomes than for someone who didn't.

The million-dollar bonus, it was called.

That tenet of faith holds true in lifetime employment studies (read: pre-2008 economic crash) that university presidents like to quote, but it doesn't seem to hold up under the more rigid test that asks: what would happen if everybody did that?

What happens when everyone pursues the degree instead of the trade, is you get a whole lot of disillusioned young people with student debt loads serving coffee to people who picked up skilled trades.

We taught our youth that “higher education” only meant a full degree.

We said that it was attainable by all, and solidified that by making basic programs practically failure-proof.

We convinced them that the university degree is more to be valued than a tradesman's ticket.

Today, we find ourselves in a country among world leaders for the percentage of people who have university education, but with high unemployment among people under 30, high levels of personal debt — and hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs going begging for people with the right skills.

That lack of trained labour is hurting the economy, and is holding back the recovery which all of our governments depend upon to balance their budgets.

CBC News, quoting unnamed sources within the federal Conservative Party, says the prime minister is “mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore.”

If that isn't a sound bite for a planned leak to a select reporter just prior to releasing the federal budget, then the government must have given up doing that kind of thing.

The federal government spends more than $2 billion a year — mostly in transfers to the provinces — for job training. CBC's national affairs specialist Greg Weston reports Harper is more than just a little upset with the lack of results.

Personally, I'm loving it when the highest office in the land wants to kick down some pressure on the provinces, who took the money.

I liked it on the issue of health care, when the feds unilaterally told the provinces: “Here's your money for health care, there's no more to come, now solve the problem amongst yourselves.”

That's the kind of stress that leads to creative problem solving.

That kind of tactic won't work as well with higher education and employment. People choose their own career and education paths; it's not like government can put a quota on so many new pipefitters or electricians per year.

But Harper does have room to make changes. And if government can't set quotas, industries can.

Canada already has apprenticeship programs all over the country, which are both government- and industry-funded. If a certain large company needs a boost in heavy duty mechanics, for instance, and is willing to pony up part of the cost of training just in that area for just one period of time, there's no impediment to government covering the rest.

Once the local shortage is met, the special program can be dropped.

It's better than spending money going abroad for workers.

Another change could be to eliminate the waiting period for EI benefits, for people enrolled in federally-funded training courses in skilled trades.

But the biggest adjustment I believe we need, is between our ears.

We need to adjust the messages we give to students at the time when they are choosing their education paths. There's a reason our universities are overflowing with students, many of whom would quite probably be more successful and happier, five years after graduating from a non-academic or trades program.

But we have told students that only the degree has value. The result is that we have devalued the basic arts and science degrees by making them so accessible as to be fail-proof. The basic credential of “higher education” has since become having two degrees.

And still, for thousands of highly-educated young people, no job.

We can't blame young people for choosing the path we told them to prefer. But if Stephen Harper has a plan to remake that, I'm for it.

Follow Greg Neiman's blog at readersadvocate.blogspot.ca