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Thank you for inviting the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) to offer its perspective on ways in which the federal government can contribute to reducing poverty in Canada. Our organization is uniquely positioned to generate, synthesize and exchange knowledge on learning in partnership with governments and NGOs: research that demonstrates how higher education and lifelong learning strengthen the foundation of “human infrastructure” upon which we build our financial security and social well-being—as individual Canadians and families, as communities, businesses and governments.
Indeed, the evidence demonstrates that higher education and continuous skills training are protective factors during times of economic instability—such as we are experiencing today—and a competitive advantage during periods of relative stability. Better-educated Canadians are more employable. They receive more formal, work-related training and supports. They have higher incomes and more savings to draw on during times of need. They are less likely to lose their jobs but, if they do, are unemployed for shorter periods of time.
Conversely, less-educated Canadians are less employable. They receive less workplace training. They have lower incomes and little or no savings. They are more likely to lose their jobs and remain unemployed for longer periods of time. Generally, the less education and training Canadians have, the less resilience and fewer resources they can draw upon to adapt and survive during an economic downturn, and the greater the risk that they—and their families—will fall into poverty and remain there for months, years and even generations to come.
In short, education and learning make individual Canadians and communities as a whole more resilient and better equipped to adapt to economic turbulence. It is that simple. But simple doesn’t mean easy: building national resilience to secure our future requires employers, educational institutions and governments to work together in a more focused, coordinated and complementary way towards this objective. While there has been laudable progress, more is required. We can and must do a better job in making Canada a learning society, so that our citizens and our businesses can weather the challenges of an unpredictable global marketplace. Just as we are currently investing significant resources in Canada’s physical infrastructure to combat an economic recession in ways that strengthen our comparative advances, so too must we invest in Canada’s human infrastructure and build the bridges of talent to the knowledge-based industries of tomorrow.
Labour market demand for knowledge workers in Canada and elsewhere is growing. It follows that we must make a concerted effort to provide Canadians with education and training opportunities to meet this demand. Without a pool of skilled labour to tap, our businesses will atrophy and become uncompetitive, or they will look elsewhere for answers. We can provide these answers here at home by creating a domestic pool of skilled talent. But we will need to do this in creative and flexible ways that can accommodate the competing demands that face adult learners, many of whom already shoulder a heavy load as parents, caregivers, volunteers and community leaders, in addition to being workers. Although post-secondary education is highly desirable, the fact is that, for most adults, the workplace remains the principal location for training, and learning or upgrading new skills.
CCL does not measure poverty directly. Instead, we examine how lifelong learning can improve economic stability by reducing periods of employment; increasing earning potential and job prospects; and contributing to a better overall quality of life and health for all Canadians. What we can do is help identify who is most vulnerable to poverty, and provide new insights into why they are at risk. No matter how we choose to measure poverty, our research points to four key groups of vulnerable Canadians: low-skilled workers, youth, recent immigrants and older workers.
With regard to low-skilled workers, our findings suggest that literacy and numeracy skills are one of the key determinants of economic inequality. In other words, skill creates economic winners and losers as employers select and reward workers with the required skills, leaving those without behind. Yet nine million Canadian adults lack the literacy skills they need to live and work in modern society. These low-skilled workers often cannot get good jobs, and their health and quality of life suffer. During a recession, they and their families increasingly experience chronic low wages, unemployment, poverty, welfare dependence and social exclusion. The effects of recession layoffs can be long lasting: laid-off workers from the late 80s and early 90s suffered an 18% to 35% decline in wages five years after being laid off, thus demonstrating that—in terms of a person’s life—economic recovery rarely keeps pace with a stock market rebound.
Canadian youth are especially vulnerable to the impacts of an economic downturn. Their lack of on-the-job experience makes it difficult to win that critical first job—especially when they must compete with more mature, better-skilled and experienced workers. Their labour market experience is uneven and erratic, and they may enter a ghetto of low-skilled, low-wage employment that becomes increasingly difficult to escape over time.
Older workers are particularly vulnerable to the depressing cycle of chronic unemployment and financial insecurity. Many had lower levels of skill when they initially entered the labour force; and there is evidence that their skills have deteriorated or are no longer relevant or sufficient for today’s job market. Against a threatening backdrop of workplace age discrimination, the challenge for them to re-train and update their skills to remain competitive is a daunting one.
Despite this urgent need to maintain and improve skill levels during the course of employment, our research reveals a worrying trend of “long-term non-trainees”. Whether for lack of interest or barriers to participation, as of 2002, this group of 2.2 million workers, or 16% of our workforce, had not participated in any formal, job-related training for a period of four years and had little intention of participating in training over the next three. Notably, more than half of this group had no education beyond high school.
All of these risk factors are compounded by the rising prevalence of contract, temporary and self-employed workers who no longer qualify for the government supports—such as Employment Insurance—intended as safety nets when the security of a regular pay cheque fails.
We know that higher education and skills training increase the resilience of these groups to the potential impacts of economic downturns. Our research shows that Canadians who continuously learn are better able to think, create and solve the types of challenges they face as participants in the global economy. This capacity, in turn, enables Canadian businesses to adapt and compete more nimbly within international markets, as higher levels of worker skill inspire the rapid rates of technical, process and organizational innovation upon which productivity growth depends. Smarter, more innovative and productive workers lead to smarter, more innovative and productive businesses. Resilient businesses foster a resilient national economy and contribute to Canada’s long-term prosperity.
We can see how significant investment in education and training—by federal, provincial and territorial governments, by educational institutions, by employers and employees—strengthens the human infrastructure upon which we all build our future success. More specifically, post-secondary education, adult learning and workplace training help individuals adapt to employment shocks and avoid financial hardship: in terms of social policy, these are therefore measures we can embrace to both anticipate and prevent—rather than merely react to—the threat of poverty.
So how do we go about reinforcing our human infrastructure to reduce poverty? What do we need to get the job done? The building materials, in this case, can perhaps be referred to as “contributions and considerations” rather than “bricks and mortar”. The first 10 “contributions” we offer address the role government can play to reduce poverty in Canada, while the second eight “considerations” are more specific steps government can take to fulfil this role in real terms.
As federal leader, the Canadian government is well positioned to contribute significantly to the reduction of poverty in Canada. You will note that, while we are already taking action in some of these areas, we could do so much more.
In effect, we could better:
The CCL does this through the Composite Learning Index, a measure of the learning conditions in society, and through international comparisons with situations in other countries around the world. A 2008 U.K. report—The Impact of Lifelong Learning on Poverty Reduction—is particularly relevant within our current context and makes the following observations:
The CCL believes the following five principles—presented to HUMA during an earlier submission on employability—are the foundation for successful workplace training initiatives:
PLAR refers to both formal and informal learning Canadians have done in the past which often does not count—but should count—in qualifying for future employment and training opportunities. The 2001 Conference Board of Canada report, Brain Gain: the Economic Benefits of Recognizing Learning and Learning Credentials in Canada, estimated that elimination of this learning recognition gap would give Canadians an additional $4.1 to $5.9 billion in annual income, and that more than 540,000 Canadians stand to gain an average of $8,000 to $12,000 each year from improved learning recognition—a significant impact for those living below the poverty line. The CCL, together with the PLA Centre, detailed PLAR efforts at the provincial level in our report, Achieving Our Potential: An Action Plan for Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR) in Canada, but discovered through this process that such efforts are not echoed at the federal level.
Many adults acquire informal learning through work. This past March, the British government launched The Learning Revolution to foster more accessible and wide-ranging opportunities for adult informal learning, recognizing that while such learning supports the development of work-related skills, it also contributes significantly to the health and well-being of communities “by building the confidence and resilience of the individuals involved”, an important stepping stone to further learning, and a more skilled and prosperous future. The annual CCL report, State of Learning in Canada: Toward a Learning Future, promotes the recognition of informal learning in a very sustained way.
As workplace leaders, unions guide government officials and provide input to work-related training programs; promote courses, events and workshops; develop training facilities; and partner with colleges to broaden the availability of programs to upgrade worker skills and credentials.
In their Thematic Review on Adult Learning, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) characterized Canada’s adult learning systems as lacking organization, cohesion and accessibility.
Global economic and societal changes place the issue of learning and training squarely at the centre of the policymaking agenda in Canada and countries around the world. Intervenors must therefore collaborate with governments to ensure Canada nurtures a skilled, adaptable and innovative workforce capable of evolving to meet the demands of our international marketplace. However, we need the ways and means, or formal structures, put in place to make such collaboration happen on a continuous basis. So equipped, we will be able to share data, explore innovative and promising best practices, and develop shared benchmarks against which we can measure our progress over time and across jurisdictions.
Academic Richard Florida argues that the key to productivity lies in human capital development, rather than investments in technology or taxation levels.[1] Both countries and companies must therefore invest in continuous adult learning, skills updating and training to remain innovative, improve business performance and increase productivity.
As previously observed, about nine million Canadians have literacy skills insufficient to meet the demands of today’s society—skills such as financial literacy. Indeed, growing numbers of Canadians are making financial choices that leave them in perilous economic circumstances: between 1982 and 2005, personal savings rates declined from 20.2% to 1.6%, and household debt ratios increased from 55 cents to $1.16 on every dollar of disposable income. We know that learning has an intergenerational impact: children emulate their adult role models in their attitudes toward learning, skills, education, financial security and life opportunities. Children’s readiness to learn and their early success in school are closely linked to parental involvement, educational attainment and attitudes toward learning: in Canada, one child in four enters school without the necessary skills, a statistic that foreshadows our level of adult illiteracy and rate of high school completion (almost one-quarter of Canadian adults have no more than a high school diploma). So the more we do for parents and grandparents, the more they, in turn, will do for their children within the home as a primary learning environment.
In 2002, about 622,000 Canadians were working poor.
Upon recognizing its important role in reducing poverty through these areas of contribution, the Government of Canada could take the following steps to promote higher education, workplace training and continuous learning, and to complement steps encompassed in Canada’s Economic Action Plan:
At the Canadian Council on Learning, we believe that the optimal approach to addressing poverty is to equip Canadian workers with the advanced skills and education they require to help themselves, their families, their employers and their country adapt and compete. We believe that investments in our own potential—our human infrastructure—offer as significant and likely more durable benefits than investments in roads, buildings and equipment. By investing in ourselves—our intellectual capital, our skills and tacit knowledge—we will realize a far more rapid and exponential return on our investment in the increased capacity and productivity of Canadian workers than we shall on our investment in physical works. This, in truth, is the kind of stimulus package that will reap the greatest, most immediate and sustained benefit for us all, as higher education and skills training advance the physical, social, financial—and economic—health and well-being of Canada and Canadians.
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Allan Gregg, “Productivity isn’t just a talking point,” The Globe and Mail (March 16, 2007). Available at: http://www.thelavinagency.com/articles_covers/Gregg/gregg-globe-mar07.pdf] (accessed March 2, 2009).
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