HANSARD

Printed and Published by Nova Scotia Hansard Reporting Services

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE

Ms. Diana Whalen (Chairman)

Dr. John Hamm

Mr. Mark Parent

Mr. Gary Hines

Mr. Howard Epstein

Mr. Charles Parker

Ms. Marilyn More

Mr. Wayne Gaudet

Mr. Harold Theriault

IN ATTENDANCE:

Mrs. Darlene Henry

Legislative Committee Clerk

WITNESSES

Department of Education - Skills and Learning Branch

Mr. Stuart Gourley, Senior Executive Director

Nova Scotia Community College

Dr. Joan McArthur-Blair, President

HALIFAX, TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 2006

STANDING COMMITTEE ON ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

9:00 A.M.

CHAIRMAN

Ms. Diana Whalen

MADAM CHAIRMAN: We're five minutes behind, so I'd like to get started, if we could. I'd like to call the meeting to order. We have with us this morning the subject of skills shortages, where we're at with our skills and labour in the province. With us we have Mr. Stuart Gourley from the Department of Education, and we also have the President of the Nova Scotia Community College, Dr. Joan McArthur-Blair. Welcome to both of you. I know you have given us quite a few handouts, and you have presentations to do as well, so I would like to turn it over to you and you can introduce any staff you have with you.

MR. STUART GOURLEY: I will start, if that's all right with Joan. I'm sure it is. The only staff I have here is Holly Dunn from my Communications Department - she's over there. I thank her very much for coming and supporting me. I'm going to go through a 50,000-foot presentation as opposed to getting down into the minutia, and then allow you to draw the minutia out of me in your questions. I think that's probably more useful to us.

It's critical, I think, for us to understand when you use the words skill shortage, where you are in context. There are really three types of things which can be attached to skill shortage. The first is simply an inadequate number of workers. There simply is not enough hands, end of story. The second kind is you have enough hands but they don't have the skills necessary to do a job. That can be a skill mismatch or it can be just a lack of skills, period. By the distinction, I mean that you could have a very skilled person who is mismatched to an open job, or you could have a person who doesn't have the essential skills and is not able to attach the labour market. That's the distinction I make.

Finally, and probably the most confusing of all, is you have an inadequate number of workers, qualified or otherwise, willing to work for the wages and working conditions that are on offer. This is often where you get a great deal of confusion coming forward. It's critical that you understand which one of the three you're in when you use skill shortages.

When we talk about skill shortages, the policy drivers are fairly well known to everybody, but just let me run through them very quickly. We have the demographic realities of the Nova Scotia population, which we've heard a great deal about. We have a declining population. More people die in this province than are born, so this causes us concern. We also have an aging population. The average skilled worker in the province is 47 years of age. That was last year's number, this year it's probably 47- point something. The point is, 50 per cent are over the age of 47.

Globalization and international competition are attacking us. We are no longer in a world of competing with New Brunswick, we are in a world of competing with India and China and other countries offshore. That competition is both for product, as well as for work. We need to keep track of that thought. We're not only selling into these competitive markets, but we're also competing with them on the worker stage as well.

We have a great deal of standard and process change occurring. The nature of work out there changes at an extraordinarily rapid rate today, much more so than it ever did in the past. That changing nature of work means that our workers need to keep up with it, and that can be very difficult if you happen to be 47 years old and out on the job market. So you need to be aware of that. The example I often use is ISO 9000. The introduction of that standards process had a very quiet but very, very impactful effect on our workforce in its requirement for literacy and numeracy, which people don't often associate with ISO 9000, but it was there and it caused people to be displaced in the labour market. So those kinds of standards coming into the province can be very useful to manufacturers and required for the labour market, but they can be very negative, on occasion.

Technological advancement, adaptation and the option of technology in terms of equipment means, you change a calendar machine at Stora, you have a whole different requirement for skill sets, and what does the employer do in order to change its workforce to meet that necessary requirement. You have skill shortages, period, by the introduction of all these other factors. You have different requirements that must be put into place in a curriculum for any institution, and then wages and working conditions and numbers of people and productivity. This is the education system as we see it. When I say "we", I'm talking about the skills and learning branch here, and I will speak for my colleagues and say the Department of Education. Basically what you see described in front of you, and you can look at it in detail in the slides that are provided, essentially you have who we engage and how we engage them. The how we engage them is often represented as high schools, Nova Scotia Community College and the universities, but there are many other types of systems that engage people in learning and those need to be recognized and celebrated and talked

about as well. That, for our purposes, and in my mind, I describe as the supply side of this equation. We then move to the economy, the workplace and the community. To me that is the demand side of this equation and probably, from my perspective, one of the most important pieces of this puzzle. We are not simply in the business of putting people off the end of an educational conveyor belt, we are engaged in putting people off to meet an employer's requirement or to meet a requirement in the world so people can be actively engaged in the labour force, and be good citizens in the community.

One of the concerns that we have is the engagement of the employer. This little statistic, while it is a gross number on many planes, it's very indicative of our employer's engagement in this thought of the necessity to have to change its workforce. What this is telling you is that Canadian employers do not invest in their workforce as much as other OECD countries. This is the comparison with OECD countries, and that needs to change.

Last but not least, CEO round tables. The Deputy Minister of Education conducted CEO round tables last Summer and Fall. We came up with six major issues that CEOs identified, but it is the top two that are of the most concern to me and, I think, to the education system. That is what they identified as students' attitudes and attributes, and when you boiled it off they were talking about essential skills - the ability to communicate, do written communication, engage in problem solving, work in teams, those kinds of things. They were not questioning technical skills. Our institutions are putting out good technical skills, but the essential skills were an issue.

Then the education process and delivery. They were looking for earlier engagement in the labour force experience. So they were looking for co-op education. They were looking to see young people come into the market earlier to gain employment skills. - I'm not even going to talk to this one, I will let you question it later, but it is a very interesting number, some of our activities.

Now, Joan, I will turn it over to you.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Ms. Blair.

DR. JOAN MCARTHUR-BLAIR: When Stuart and I talked about presenting to the Standing Committee on Economic Development, Stuart kind of took that 50,000-foot view of the skill shortage as the department sees it and what I did was try and bring that down to the community college level a little bit in terms of some of the things that are going on and some of the information that is available. So what I have done is provide a series of snapshots that I thought might prompt conversation about where we are at this moment in time.

I think everyone knows this statistic, that Canadian colleges and institutes account for eight per cent of all direct and indirect workforce-related income in the country now, and

across the country the return to taxpayers on investment in colleges and institutes is about 19 per cent. Of course we try to anecdotally record the social savings - welfare, health and support and so on.

When we look at community colleges across the province, I took a few different slices of snapshots that I thought might prompt conversation. The first one is that there is a higher proportion of students who were Aboriginal, had dependent children or who had disabilities, who managed to attend college - and you see the graph on the right. Also, community colleges tend to be accessible to low-income families and we've been involved in a series of meetings across the province as the Nova Scotia Community College ramps up its next strategic plan, and a lot of both employers and other people as we were moving across the province have said we need to ensure that low-income families have access. It is one of the answers to the skill shortage, from their view.

[9:15 a.m.]

Less skilled workers, we all know, are economically vulnerable. One of the things that post-secondary education provides is the ability to be less vulnerable in the workforce, to match the right skill to the right times. As Stu said, it's not just about numbers of workers, it's getting the right skill set in. Community colleges in Nova Scotia, of course, are spread right across the province and we're trying to be as responsive to that skill shortage as we possibly can.

One of the things that we've discovered as we've moved across the province is that there are some policies - federal policies in particular - that employers aren't able to cross-train, retrain people while they work, and this is causing some contribution to the skill shortage.

These are just some stats about under-education in Atlantic Canada and I took an Atlantic view for a particular reason because I think the Nova Scotia Community College and the Nova Scotia post-secondary system has an Atlantic view in some of the work that we do. If you noticed Stu's stat earlier for Nova Scotia, about 50 per cent of young people right out of high school do not pursue post-secondary; the Atlantic stat is 40 per cent and 20 per cent of the Atlantic labour force is without a high school diploma. I've talked with employers right across the province in the last two months and they have said post-secondary education is the benchmark to enter the workplace in the modern world. I think that's a profound issue in the face of a skill shortage.

This stat comes from the Canadian Labour Congress - a 1 per cent increase in literacy raises the productivity of our country 2 per cent. So it's pretty profound to think that that 1 per cent literacy increase could have such a profound impact on the province and the country. I think this is something NSCC is involved in and employers are involved in to increase

literacy in the workplace so people can cross-train, retrain, as part of the answer to the skill shortages.

A little snapshot of who the Nova Scotia Community College is today. You all know that we have 13 campuses spread across the province. We currently have 22,000 learners with us this year and we're organized across 103 programs currently, which we try to align as much as possible with business and industry in the province.

An interesting stat from COPS; if you look at the requirement for college, 89 per cent of all new jobs in Nova Scotia in the next five years will require post-secondary education. The startling statistic is how much of that is at the college level and I think it is a huge driving force in terms of just the quantity of graduates we need to put out into the system over the next few years.

I thought everyone might be interested in transition programs - I'm not going through these. We have 25 or more transition programs that we do with high schools across the province to help young people either experiment, gain skills, a whole variety of different options - everything from dual credit to summer learning opportunities for teachers - to help young people think about the options they might have. This is just a simple list of that.

I think you're also familiar with this stat. NSCC takes its transfer to work very seriously; 90 per cent employment rate last year, 95 per cent of that 90 per cent are employed in the Province of Nova Scotia.

A little snapshot of what we think is working now. I think core programming is responsive to industry; customized programming is happening in community colleges; the relationship between the college and school boards in terms of MOUs and beginning more and more to help youth experiment with what their future might be; college prep; experiential programs, Techsploration being one for young women who want to get involved in trades and tech; and our access programs. We try as much as possible to be programming without barriers.

Some of the things we need to think about for the skill shortages are more system-wide opportunities to explore career opportunities to help reduce that 50 per cent of Nova Scotians who aren't going to post-secondary immediately; to begin to invest in hybrid learning and work models that provide alternative delivery, so people can cross-train, retrain, they're already out there. But more than anything, I think, we're beginning at the Nova Scotia Community College to begin to look at this idea of education without boundaries, because if we're going to meet the skill shortage, we need education that is hugely flexible across as many options as possible.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much, that's a great start. For the first question I have Mark Parent.

MR. MARK PARENT: Thank you for your presentation, both of you. I heard a fuller presentation from you, Stuart, and I wish others had a chance to hear it. I did recommend that we hear it in our caucus because I think it's a very, very good presentation. I want to talk to your chart though, because the chart is interesting in two main areas, in my opinion, and I just want to get your response to it. One is that 58 per cent of high school graduates disappear. So I would like some more information on that. The other is, of the 42 per cent that go on to post-secondary education, 84 per cent of this province are going on to university, and I wonder how that compares with other provinces.

MR. GOURLEY: Let me answer your last question first. In other jurisdictions, the percentage is roughly 60/40 as opposed to that which we experience here in Nova Scotia. So that deals with that. To go back to the other 58 per cent, I would love to be able to answer that question and, indeed, we are engaging in a longitudinal study now, which is only just beginning to find out where that 58 per cent is going. My guess is that there's a percentage there, probably in the 4 to 6 range, who go on to post-secondary in other provinces, other jurisdictions. That's just a guess, that's all that is. The rest, I believe, attach to the labour market immediately, but then cycle back into the post-secondary system somewhere later on in their lives, usually back into the community college and some into the university sector. So that statistic is right at the point of graduation.

So people are leaving, and they do that for a number of different reasons. We find in a good economy what happens is high school students will become attached to the labour market as a part-time occupation during 11 and 12, and the money becomes very attractive. So when they graduate, they simply become full-time employees of wherever they're at, and don't attach to post-secondary.

MR. PARENT: We're doing a longitudinal study, do you have a timing on when we'll have that sort of information?

MR. GOURLEY: Well, the first data will be about a year out, and then we're going to do it every year after.

MR. PARENT: In terms of the 60/40 percentage, that's more typical of other provinces, clearly we're imbalanced in terms of university versus community college. Has there been some change since the investment that the government made in community college education?

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: Every year it increases a few percentage points. So we're on that track toward a similar balance that we see across the country. I think if you look at the fact that the Nova Scotia Community College, its Act, is only 10 years old, we've grown very rapidly in terms of that statistic, but we're nowhere near the 60/40 per cent yet.

MR. PARENT: We are making progress?

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: No question about it.

MR. PARENT: Just following up on this 58 per cent that disappear and tying in another question I had. I was in Washington, D.C., for a conference and one of the MLAs there was from Alberta and they're experiencing an acute skill shortage, but they also have a lot more money to spend at attracting people. We heard on the radio today, attracting Stora employees, trying to lead them away, and maybe even a problem with Grade 12 students who go out to Alberta, can find good money, and aren't encouraged to go on and take post-secondary training the way they should. I know we are in a global marketplace, but this interprovincial competition is another factor. How do we deal with that? Is there a problem there? Are provinces like Alberta impacting upon Nova Scotia?

MR. GOURLEY: There's absolutely no question that the extraordinarily hot economy in Alberta is affecting Nova Scotia because they are attracting, through very, very high wages, people from Nova Scotia. It would be impossible for us to compete against a $90,000 welder. We simply don't have the economy that would support that kind of number. Let's remember in the grand scale of things, 10 years ago in Alberta what were people doing, they were walking away from houses because they couldn't pay their mortgages because their economy wasn't hot. Economies are cyclic. So that will slow down and, hopefully, our economy will get that way and it will be the other way around.

The other way to look at this thing in terms of people going out to Alberta is, we are trying to work with Alberta companies and say, okay, can you provide the work experience - we provide the training and you provide the work experience, but the worker doesn't actually move to Alberta with the family, they stay here, and they fly back and forth every two weeks. Now, that is a little hard on people, but you could turn that around and say that is inventory on the shelf. So we're going to have highly experienced people in oil and gas who we can repatriate when some project opens up. So, there are two ways of looking at the question, but there is no question that a $90,000 welder is not going to occur in Nova Scotia, but that is a wages and working conditions issue that will adjust itself.

MR. PARENT: One of the concerns I have, Joan, you mentioned that we need to do more in terms of exploring clear options for Grades 9 to 12. There are people in my riding and there are people across the province who have been claiming that with the demise of the vocational system that we shortchanged people, that there are students dropping out at Grade 10, mainly young males, who aren't going on to post-secondary education, aren't going on to community college and who are really calling, in many ways, for return to the past, rather than moving forward, yet I notice in your other chart that 89 per cent of all the new jobs in Nova Scotia require post-secondary. So how do we meet the needs of those in Grade 10 without moving back and shortchanging them, in a sense, by not encouraging to move forward with higher education, if 89 per cent of all the jobs will demand that?

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: I'm going to let Stuart respond to this as well, because we have been talking about this a lot. I think the Nova Scotia Community College is really working with the P-12 system to provide ways for young people to experiment with what they might do in the future, rather than to try and gain the skill at the Grade 10 level. I have spent a lot of time in the last two months talking to employers across the province, and not one has said to me that this is something that they see as part of their future. They don't see the capacity anymore to be able to take people with numeracy and literacy skills out of Grade 10 and Grade 11 into the occupations that are before them. So I think that this is a profound issue for us, as a province, to get people to the community college doors. I think one of the ways to do that is to let young people experiment in what it might be.

As a person in higher education, I always take some care about talking about the P-12 system, but if we think about young people being disenfranchised for a variety of reasons, it is not necessarily because they are ready to learn an occupation, there are socio-economic issues, drug issues, family issues, and boredom issues. There is this spectrum. So I think one of the things a college can do, because we are geographically dispersed across the province, we can help the P-12 system with things like Summer camps. Many of the programs that we currently do, dual crediting - we have this wonderful experiment running in Lunenburg where the high school students come over to our facilities on Fridays and use our facilities because we have the capacity to capitalize our facilities in ways that high schools often don't. So, I think there are a lot of rich initiatives that we could begin to push forward to help people get to the community college if 89 per cent of the jobs are going to require that.

I had an employer express it to me in a very interesting way. He said it is one thing to have labourers on my site, but if people aren't becoming journeyed, then there will be a moment in the not too distant future when my journey people retire and I only have labourers, and I cannot build a house with labourers. I think it is not just an issue from a skills point of view, but an issue from actually driving some of the industries forward that it is not just a number of people issue, it really is a skills issue, and that skill is post-secondary education now as entry to work. So I think it is a profound issue for us. I view it as multiple options; it is almost as multiple as every young person who is trying to look at their future. I think it is partnering with the P-12 system. I think it is providing different kinds of opportunities for them to experiment. I think it is providing intensive Summer camps for some of our best and brightest who might want to work in areas they have never even thought about. So, it is an interesting problem. I think that there are lots of opportunities for us to make those things happen.

[9:30 a.m.]

MR. GOURLEY: I'd like to jump in on that question, too, because I get up in the morning thanking God somebody hired Joan, we think so much alike. We have an operating system in the Skills and Learning Branch that sits in the background of everything that's called seamless education. If I can blur the lines between the community college and the P-12

system, I want to do that. If I can blur the lines between the community college and the universities, I want to do that so that people can move through it very easily with credit for what they've done.

So with that as an operating premise, what we want to see is the high schools engaging with the Nova Scotia Community College around our program called Options and Opportunities where they will have an opportunity to gain credit within the college, to be exposed to the shops and so forth that exist within the college, and to the other types of programs that would be offered by the college. But we also want to add a third leg to the stool and that's the employer and what can the employer do for those high school students to engage them in a way that the learning for them is meaningful.

Joan described some of the reasons why students disengage in the high school system, but they also disengage because they may not be the type of learner who can sit in a classroom for five or six hours a day, you know, the "chalk and talk" kind of thing. They may need another kind of learning. They could be an A-plus student. These are not - we've used the phrase unfortunately - the students who fall through the cracks, and that's a real misnomer and it doesn't do justice to the students. These are students who are not engaged and they cannot be engaged for the reasons that Joan described. They can be not engaged because they're not the kind of learner for a classroom situation. There can be a multitude of things that cause them to disengage. So what can we do?

Well, we can do this. We can attach them in ways with the community college. We can design our high school program, Options and Opportunities, in a way that they can actually work at the same time that they're in high school and gain an experience within the labour market in an area that they want to explore. This is more than co-op. It would be a full semester for every afternoon, for example, where they would actually go to the employer's place of work and work for the employer. We would provide supervision through hiring of a mentor for that student and off they would go. So they would have a chance to explore that.

Now, it's possible in Grade 10 they might explore something, if I may, auto mechanics, but they may realize this is not for me, I want to do something else. So then they may end up going to one of the hospitals to explore one of the lab tech situations and do that as an option in Grade 11. In Grade 12 they may choose something else. It's better to do it then than after going through post-secondary and having a huge debt and saying I don't want to do this now, I don't feel like this. It's a chance for them to explore and a chance for them to learn what the employer requires, a chance for them to see another piece of the education system and experiment with it. So I think that Options and Opportunities program is really a better answer to that vocational question than to take a group of students, pick them up and put them over here, and separate them - you know, that idea of separation I'm not sure is a great one.

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: Can I add, with the chairman's permission, one more thing to this. You know, I think sometimes looking at it in a very practical sense helps. There's a brand new Lexus coming on the market, which I'm sure I'll never get to drive. (Laughter). It has the capacity to self-parallel park. You drive up and with a series of mirrors and computerized steering, you take your hands off the wheel, and it will park the car.

The numeracy and literacy required to fix that car is post-secondary numeracy and literacy and that I think is literally what is before us, that the person who will fix that car needs to get to the community college in order to participate in the modern economy. So I think some of the things that Stu is talking about help young people experiment with the possibilities before them, not try to learn the occupation because, in fact, the numeracy and literacy skills aren't high enough to learn the occupation at that moment. So I think it's a wonderful example of the kinds of complexities that are here now for a 19-year-old. So imagine what that 19-year-old is going to have to know by the time they're 55.

MR. PARENT: Thank you very much. I know my time is up, but I appreciate the emphasis on this because you do hear a lot of people saying, oh, well, let's just put them out of Grade 10 into trades. I think that would shortchange the students and the vision that you have, I think a much richer vision, and one that will be a benefit not only to the province but to the individuals themselves. So I just thank you for your response and I'll be back with my other question.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Yes, we usually have a second round as well. I have made one mistake, I didn't get everybody to introduce themselves this morning. So I'm going to start with Mr. Parker and go once around and then we have several people on our list for questions.

[The committee members introduced themselves.]

MADAM CHAIRMAN: I will call on Howard to continue the questioning.

MR. HOWARD EPSTEIN: Thank you, and thank you for the presentations. It was very useful. I should note that our caucus heard recently from Dr. McArthur-Blair a lengthy briefing about the community college system that was very helpful. A lot of us are fans of the community college system, a lot of us think it does a very good job, and a lot of us are very glad that new buildings are going up for a new campus on the Dartmouth side of the harbour. A lot of us would like to see more resources going into our education system generally. Even given some of the constraints, we think it does a good job and we look forward to continued growth in the system.

I say all this because I want to identify a problem and I don't want it to be misunderstood because I think we're engaging in a very good way with the problems that we

do have. I want to identify something I think is a bit problematic about the system as it exists right now and seek your comments and advice.

It seems to me that what occurs right now is that we have something of a reactive system. We have a system in which - particularly at the community college level - people are given training that suits them for jobs that already exist in our economy. I know you work actively to maintain your links with employers around the province, which is entirely appropriate, and you talk to them about their needs. What I'm concerned about is the nature of the economy is transforming itself. This is going on in many sectors. Indeed, I took some of the comments I heard from both of you this morning to indicate that you're very much aware of that and that there is change afoot.

Surely, when you look forward and you realize so many of the jobs that will be created in the future will need post-secondary education, what you're saying to us is the nature of the economy is transforming.

I think about two sectors in particular at the moment. I think about our energy sector and I think about our forestry sector. It seems to me it's easy to anticipate and indeed it has been anticipated for a long time that there are major changes that are going to take place and are taking place in those sectors. I worry that if we don't turn our minds collectively to the future needs of those sectors, for example, we won't have the skills available.

Another way to think about this is to think of it even as a form of entrepreneurship. Let me illustrate with the energy sector. If we can anticipate that wind and solar and wave and heat pumps and so on are all going to be much greater realities in terms of how people generate energy, then why aren't we training people right now to do those things even if there isn't an employer out there, or very few employers out there right now who are prepared to say I have a complete setup right now and I'm hiring? Why don't we turn out these people and let them be their own entrepreneurs, start their own partnerships, get their own businesses going?

It used to be in economics that there was a theory called Say's Law, which says "supply creates its own demand." It's a discredited theory when it comes to goods, but it's a very good theory when it comes to human skills and knowledge. If people know how to do things, they'll probably find a way to market those skills.

I could illustrate with forestry where, again, we're looking at serious problems with one of our major pulp and paper mills - who knows what the future of our forestry might be, but it's been one thing for a long time but it seems to be changing.

So, I toss this out to both of you because I'm concerned about this. I wonder, first, am I correctly understanding the system that we have now that it's mostly reactive and not

so much anticipatory? Second, is there some chance that we can shift the basis so that it becomes more anticipatory and thinks about the transformations that are going to take place?

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: I think we're somewhere in the middle. We're a bit reactive and a bit anticipatory and, rightly so, I think that you've touched on something that we've been talking about internally at the college a lot over the last couple of months and what we call in academic terms the creation of a "futures academy". What a futures academy does is exactly that, it tries to predict a trend. There may be only one person to employ in the province at this moment, but you can see the trend coming and I think it is a powerful piece of work that we can undertake as a college to help with those kinds of trends.

I think that we do need to be both leading and following as I say, in that sense of education, where we need to react to what employers need immediately. We also need to be talking to those entrepreneurs on the edge who say, I have been trying to create an industry and I have no one to hire. I think it is an interesting place and I think right now we're kind of somewhere in between those anticipating and reacting places, but I think that the ability is more and more to identify the trends and move toward them. An example, the Nova Scotia Community College will be involved shortly in a research project to create a GIS solar map of the province. Well, right there, there is a trend about to happen. If we're moving in that direction, then there is going to be some need in the energy sector down the road for that kind of skill set. So, I think it's a very powerful opportunity for us. Some institutions have taken up this nature of futures academy, where they are beginning to supply a demand that is not yet quite apparent. I think it is a very powerful piece of the work that we can do.

MR. GOURLEY: I think Joan has touched on a very large percentage of what the question engenders in terms of an answer. I think the necessity of being ahead of the curve, in terms of what is required in terms of skills, can be done up to a point. I think the college, in particular, is very active in that direction and through support in the department, is also active through that inasmuch as we attach ourselves to associations and industry organizations, in order to determine what is coming in over the gunnel. For example, we have a system now coming in called, Boost, which most people in the room probably haven't heard about, but it is an aerospace and defence industry manufacturing standard and so we will take that bit of information and will hand it to the college and say, now in your aviation training, you need to take this into consideration.

So there is that kind of information flow that goes on. But more importantly, I think what you've touched on is the issue of re-education or retraining for workers over time. The fact of the matter is that if we could all predict the future and know what skills were coming and exactly how things were going to pan out in 10 years, we would probably be in another business that involved predicting the future. So, what we have to have is a system that is able to react and a culture which values and supports re-education. So if you are a worker in a particular plant that has a change or if you're displaced because of closure or a changing nature of work, as in the forestry industry example that you gave, we then have a net that

captures you and says, okay, you can be retrained or re-educated to do something else, but our culture has to believe that and to honour that and to value that. If it doesn't, then what you get is sort of a one-off, two month retraining program to make a fisherman a computer expert. Well, that is not what I'm talking about. I'm really talking about a more systemic and more embedded system that says, okay, if you're displaced, we can now re-educate you to be something completely different.

The second part of that piece is, I don't think we can any longer take the road of training for occupations. I think we now have to move to a system that trains for skill sets which are then aggregated around the new developing types of occupations. For example, I was addressing the Board of the Nova Scotia Community College a couple of weeks ago and one of the board members said, you know, what we need is a person who can take care of all of the windmills in this province, and I said, you know, you're right, there is an awful lot of windmills coming around in this province. These are the electric generation windmills I'm talking about here, not Don Quixote's type. Anyway, what we have is a type of occupation that takes a little bit of electrical, a little bit of aerodynamic engineering, a little bit of structural engineering, puts it all together in a person, but why not have those skill sets just there that people can actually go and get them and put them together in this new kind of occupation. So no longer train for the occupation but, in fact, provide the skill-set training which people can then aggregate as they require for the type of job they're going to enter into.

[9:45 a.m.]

MR. EPSTEIN: Let's focus on that particular one. Is that skill set being taught somewhere in the province?

MR. GOURLEY: It's not being taught per se, but what we do have available to us now and what we can go and do is we do have electrical, we do have aerodynamic, we do have structural, all within the college. All we need to do now is say, okay, we'll put together a program in order to meet that requirement. So we can do it very quickly - and I speak for the college - and I think relatively easy. But somebody has to say, okay, that's there or that is coming.

MR. EPSTEIN: But it's here, it is here now?

MR. GOURLEY: Yes, but it hasn't been here that long. You and I, given our chronology, could probably think back to the time when in-floor heating came into the province. It was 10 years before we even had a course offered in this province for in-floor heating. Today, you never even think twice about it, but it took 10 years to do that. Wind power and solar power are relatively new in the province in terms of contribution to the grid and so I think we can react - we're reacting in three years now. Hopefully, we could get that

to three months and then maybe we would be a little bit in the future. So it's a question of steps, we're halfway there. Give us a chance and we might get all the way there.

MR. EPSTEIN: I'm sure there are other questioners, I can come back. Can I be in the second round, too?

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Yes, thanks very much. Next we have Marilyn.

MS. MARILYN MORE: Thank you. I'm going to take a slightly different line of questioning and, first of all, I want to say I've had the chance to meet with both of you recently and I'm really pleased and impressed with the work you're doing, but I guess I want to look at some broader issues here. Stu, you identified that one of the factors defining the skill shortages is an inadequate number of workers willing to work for the wages and working conditions offered.

I think some of the literature put out by your own division has suggested that the most pressing need is in health, retail, wholesale and call centres. It has struck me that these are sectors that are dominated by women in terms of the workforce that are currently in them and it also strikes me that those lines of work tend to have a wage gap with similar work where men dominate the workforce.

I guess I'm concerned about what some people suggest, the tinkering that's happening in terms of trying to meet the skill shortage when it's such a broader sort of philosophical and political framework that needs to be looked at in order to have some long-lasting impact, especially for women and low-income residents in this province. So I'm just wondering, what are either of you doing to meet some of those sort of root causes and the broader social situation instead of just, you know, looking at particular courses and segments of the population?

MR. GOURLEY: Well, from my perspective the wages and working conditions question is a question of information and marketplace pressure. So I hear some employers saying to me, you know, I get a lot of workers who come through the door and they leave me. So I go, well, they leave you, what do you mean? Well, they're going across the street for another $5 an hour. Where's the question, what's the problem? I think there has to be a realization brought to the employment community that you do need to adjust your wages and working conditions according to the demand that's out there, according to the pressures that exist within the marketplace.

I think the other thing that everybody needs to be cognizant of when you're talking about wages and working conditions is there are very socially-oriented questions and for employers the social issues are never, or often not, the driving factor. So how do you get the message out there and get the information out there in a way that has an employer look at it and say, okay, maybe my cost structure can absorb a change in the wage and working

condition if I do these other things, but that is going to cause dislocation when that occurs and we have to recognize that. So the net has to be around the dislocated worker and changing that and supporting that in terms of an education system.

Joan, do you want to jump in here a little bit?

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: I think most of the colleges work around this really around helping young people and people who are coming to retrain and people who are coming through our school of access to gain high school and then come on to post-secondary education; to look at choices that are viable. We keep pushing against the typical gender barriers of women not entering trades and technology and more and more trying to create pathways for people so if they're doing one thing they can take that skill and begin to move into another program. A lot of our work is around trying to help people make choices that become viable and then lifestyles for them.

I think this is a massive issue in society around the choices across occupations. I think our work really is around trying to help young people who haven't yet come to post-secondary and also people who are on the doorstep of post-secondary to think about the occupation they're choosing. If it's something they desire to do, is it going to be viable for them economically? Will they be able to create a lifestyle with it?

I think our societal work is really there in terms of helping people choose and to really encourage people to cross the traditional jurisdictional lives - programs like Techsploration to help young women think about trades and tech instead of the top few typically female occupations. Our work is really in that sector, around the kinds of career choices people are making.

MS. MORE: It's interesting because I also sit on the Standing Committee on Community Services which covers Health and Education as well as Community Services. I see a very interesting connection in that we've spent a lot of time - I'm going to completely change topics here - talking about inadequacies of childcare in this province and quite frankly, I see that as having a direct relationship with a number of the concerns that are being expressed today in terms of employers suggesting that students and new employees often have poor attitudes towards work.

It's been proven in international research that if you extend the most positive learning opportunities below the age of five in a country, it tends to increase their school readiness skills and it also helps them to become more productive citizens. Instead of starting at public school, as you suggest you're going to work more closely with, I'm thinking that we really need to be looking at the very beginning years of our workforce in terms of putting them in situations where they're going to enhance their ability, their numeracy, their literacy, their degree of co-operation that they work with other people. I think this goes back to birth.

That's why I'm concerned that, looking at fine tuning the system after people are grown and have this basic level of skill, learning and education, that we're really not intervening in a positive way early enough.

Getting back to the childcare, we've heard recently that a lot of immigrant mothers who hopefully will increase as the immigration policy expands and continues in this province, many of them don't even have access to your programs because they can't get adequate childcare in order to attend.

These things are all related and I guess I'm concerned that if employers aren't looking at the broad social picture and the Department of Education and the community college system naturally are focusing on their area of responsibility, that's where we need the political leadership to come in to make sure that all those gaps and disconnects are covered. If we're not looking at the total social policy, I think we're just going to jerk ahead, step back, jerk ahead, step back. We're not going to have that evolution and progress that we need to meet the skill shortage in this province. Thank you.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: I don't think that was a question, Marilyn. That was very good though.

Gary Hines.

MR. GARY HINES: Thank you, Madam Chairman. Recently I had a conversation with some of the individuals from Dexter Construction or the Dexter Group. I've always applauded their program with the Dexter Institute, which you are familiar with because they work with you on this. They told me that recently they've gone to England looking for heavy equipment operators and I said I understand that, but you have an opportunity in your midst to train your operators, but you're making it difficult for these individuals who can, in fact, learn to operate equipment by making educational requirements too high and these individuals are not prepared to get beyond a Grade 9 or Grade 10 level, but they can operate equipment. Equipment operators are highly paid jobs. Sometimes we don't get recognized in the community as being in a status position or position of equality.

So I think one of the things we're doing wrong, and have done wrong in the past, is not promote the skill sets that they can develop institutionally, if they're given the opportunity, they won't fall through the cracks. In other words, I said to Dexter, why don't you have a two-prong program; one, you have the program where you learn everything from a bit of engineering and surveying and management, et cetera, along with your operational skills, but you should have one where these individuals don't fall through the cracks because they can't do the math so to speak.

I'm not saying this to be sarcastic, but I think we get into a societal belief that manual labour is a Mexican and he's not. There are people who will work with their hands. They will

not be able to grasp the requirements of higher education, but they can take meaningful jobs if they're given the opportunity to train, to take those and give them some kind of recognition when they've completed those courses. So I think there's a place where there's going to be a split where if we're going to have those individuals who can work with their hands and maintain those skills and because they're high paying jobs, we can't have the requirements for them to get into our institutions being beyond their reach.

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: I'm not sure there was a question.

MR. HINES: Yes, there is. My question I guess is, what do we do to get beyond that belief that you have to have the ability to do your Grade 12 or your Grade 12 equivalent to move on to jobs where you don't really require that?

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: It's interesting - and Stu may want to respond to this as well - I don't have the statistical information for you. All I have is the anecdotal information of spending the last couple of months talking to employers in the province. As I talked to employers in the province, what they're saying is the numeracy and literacy required to be on the work site is so high that post-secondary is becoming the required entrance. So that's what employers are saying to us, but I think there's a huge opportunity for someone who leaves in Grade 9 and Grade 10 and is working in a labour job of some kind, for the college to partner with workplaces to help that person get that numeracy and literacy because if, in fact, they are a very capable person, there's no reason why they can't get the numeracy and literacy. So I think there's a whole partnership that can happen between employers and the college to help people who are currently working to get the numeracy and literacy they would need to be cross-trained, retrained, as the workplace becomes more and more technical.

I think it's both a challenge and an opportunity. It's not easy work to do because an individual has to, you know, admit that they need high school in order to do what they're doing and the employer has to partner with the college to do so. So I think there is a huge opportunity there and as I've been moving around the province, employers have been pushing against the idea of how open our access is currently and they would like to see some of our prerequisites go up, not down, in order to meet the technological demand of their industry. The Nova Scotia Community College is an access college and we're not going to move in that direction, but I think it is a statement of the demand that they're feeling. For example, in some of the heavy-duty industries they have been saying to the college, you're doing a remarkable job in your two-year program. In terms of the technology we're facing, repairing modern equipment, by the time you're finished with them for two years, they're just entry-level workers. In order for them to meet the technological bar, you would have to keep them longer.

[10:00 a.m.]

So I think this is a profound issue. How do we work with people who are leaving who don't have a capacity? I think there are huge opportunities in doing that, and some of that I think resides with employers to say, you have somebody who's working as a labourer, how do you cross-train them now to do work that requires the numeracy and literacy of the technology of the workplace?

MR. HINES: I agree with you. I've had the opportunity, because my background is construction, to have a couple of kids work with us running equipment. They both got into the Dexter Institute but couldn't handle the math levels, so they dropped out of the Dexter Institute. They'll continue to run equipment, but there's no place for them to move to because there's no certification that comes out that qualifies them as a heavy-equipment operator. They're just another number when they move on. I think we have to have some way of recognizing their accomplishments and achievements if they move on to another area or another field that they have mechanical skills. Mechanical skills are every bit as important as literacy skills.

I agree with you, I think if we can get them in and keep them there, recognize that we can improve the literacy and numerical skills as well, but I don't think we can disqualify them because they don't have that capacity at present, or haven't developed that capacity.

That's where my problem is, they get relegated to a classification where they're just labourers, that's what society sees, that they are just labourers, but they're making $60,000 or $70,000 a year and they don't feel like they're just labourers. We may be missing the opportunity to recognize that element and, as well, put the numeracy and literacy skills into the equation.

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: Before Stu jumps in, I wanted to say one other thing. The college, particularly in the last five years, has spent a tremendous amount of time trying to develop seamless pathways for people coming through the college. That is work that is kind of never-ending for us. This is exactly the kind of work, I think, the college needs to undertake so that person has that set of skills and not this set of skills and gets credit for this piece, and we add that piece to it. As a portfolio college, that's really what portfolio, as a philosophy, has built around, that ability to take a certain set of skills and add to it as you go along.

MR. HINES: Exactly.

MR. GOURLEY: I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding built into this argument that you're making. Gary, you would probably know the terms better than I would because of where you come from. If you're building a roof truss and you get all the gables coming together and all the rest of it, when I built my house, my framer, who did this, was

exactly what you described. He was a high school drop-out, no post-secondary education. He didn't spend a lot of time figuring this out, he just knew - you cut it this way, it's a compound mitre. What you have to realize is what he's working with, there is geometry on three plains, he's working with equations, he's working with measurement, it's just being expressed differently.

The fundamental problem we have is that our system is set up only to measure that capacity in one way - sit down with an exam and write it out. There are folks who just aren't going to express themselves that way. They express themselves through their hands. What we need to move to is some kind of a measurement system that says you have the geometric necessities to cover the essential learning "legals" - as the P-12 system calls them - for getting out of Grade 12, for graduating from Grade 12. You're just going to express it differently than sitting down with a math exam. To say that we should move the bar down from Grade 12 to Grade 9, I don't think is the right way to say it. What we need to do is change the measurement system in Grades 9, 10, 11 and 12 so these people do in fact get the recognition they deserve.

I live on a dirt road, I get on my knees every Spring to the road grader. I know if the road grader guy has been on the grader for more than 10 years or not simply by driving up the road. The guy that's been in it for 10 years has learned the skills just by experience. We need to capture that thought, and measure earlier and view it earlier in the student. That's where we need to get to. I think we can get there, but it's going to take a little bit of time.

In terms of the dropout who doesn't get recognized credentials or has some other skill that needs to be recognized, part of the amendments that we brought in with the Apprenticeship and Trades Qualifications Act, which are still in review, would allow us to give certificates of competency in particular areas to recognize those innate types of things and measure it through a competency-based exam and through an experiential exam, rather than through a written exam. That's why we were doing that because we were doing things like making a trade compulsory and we have a guy who has been in the trade for 20 years, doesn't have any of the credentials, isn't going to go back and learn how to write an exam and do all those other things but is probably a better tradesperson in that area than the greenhorn coming in through the exam system, but we were putting them out of business by making it compulsory. So we need a mechanism to recognize the capability that's simply learned and expressed through the hands, rather than through the written word.

MR. HINES: For an example, I've been involved with the on-site sewage industry for a number of years and we've established a non-profit group called Wastewater Nova Scotia and we now do the education programs to license our on-site sewage installers and some of our installers who were doing the education process and the upgrading process, we have to give them oral examinations because they do not read or write, but they can calculate the degree of slope, they can do all the things that are required. But we're giving them a licensing now through a program endorsed by the province. It allows them to go on and work

for companies and come in with this skill set and it increases their wage level and their opportunities by giving them just this basic skill set to install on-site sewage. Those are things that I think we need to do more of and that was the point I was trying to make.

You're right on, these people have tremendous skills and capabilities, motor skills and so on, but we have to recognize them so that it gives them advantage in the workplace. Thank you.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much, Gary. I would like to call on Charlie Parker.

MR. CHARLES PARKER: Thank you, Madam Chairman. An interesting topic, folks, certainly one, as MLAs, we run across quite a bit. People are concerned about how they can get higher education or get on to a better level. I guess my topic is around the costs of going to school, the costs of going to university, community college or whatever. The stat was mentioned earlier that 58 per cent of high school graduates don't go to post-secondary education, at least not immediately, they often go into the workforce.

A lot of young people get their first job, maybe they earn $7 or $8 an hour and perhaps they move on to their second job and might be getting $10 an hour or whatever and lots of times these young people, it seems they get trapped. They get obligations. They get a car payment or an apartment cost or whatever, so then it becomes hard for them to be able to afford to take university education or community college or whatever. Maybe because they're earning $10 hour, maybe they're in a relationship, they have child care expenses or whatever and they have all the usual bills that we all have, so they find it hard to get out of that and be able to afford to pay $15,000 to go to university or if they're going to community college, I think it's $2,500 tuition. But it's not just those costs, it's the cost of living or the wage replacement or whatever.

I guess one situation that I can think of is that one young fellow came to see me at my office and again he felt sort of trapped because he was in a job at a call centre that just kept going, so he couldn't get a layoff in order to get sponsorship from employment insurance and if he quit his job, then he wouldn't be eligible for EI and therefore he wouldn't be eligible for sponsorship from Human Resources. He can get a student loan but he just couldn't afford to pay all his other living expenses. So is there any way around helping young people like that who are three, four, five years out of high school who have obligations and in many cases are not eligible for EI sponsorship; any ideas or suggestions on how they can afford to take post-secondary education?

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: Shall I trust that to the Department of Education?

MR. GOURLEY: Sure, why not? It's budget season. (Laughter) To go to university is an expensive process. End of story. The cost of running the system is what it is and so it

would have to be taking a look at that structure, I suppose, if you wanted to lower the cost of doing it. The other way is to support students, which we currently do through the student loan process. For a Nova Scotian student who accesses the Nova Scotia Student Loan Program, which I'm not overly familiar with but I have some knowledge of, if you come out at the end of four years with $20,000 in Nova Scotia student loans, if you do the right things at the right time and the right place, you only have to pay back about $14,000 of that which is not bad relief, thank you very much, you know, getting forgiveness for $6,000. I wish my Visa card worked that way, but it doesn't.

So I think there are some things being done, but to make that better or to subsidize students going to college is a very expensive thing, and the taxpayer has to make that decision that that's what they want to do. It's not something that somebody wakes up in the morning and makes a decision about. Now, in terms of the college and its tuition, I think we're, what, in the middle pack, Joan, across the jurisdictions?

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: We're a little higher than the middle of the pack.

MR. GOURLEY: I would like to find ways to keep that where it is and move it up in very small increments if I could do that. So we have a chance there to move people into the post-secondary system through that mechanism that's not overly expensive, but to go to university is an expensive process, there's absolutely no question about it. So you either reduce the cost or you subsidize the student going. Either one of those is going to be a cost back to the taxpayer and they have to make that decision about whether they want to do that or not.

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: Maybe I would just add, I think that as many possible policies, opportunities for people to access education in the face of a skill shortage is a critical thing before us. I think, UIB, an example, someone who is in that position, how does that person keep working full-time and access some funds to return to school, part-time or full-time, so that they can begin to move along on the education track. I think these are profound issues and when we think about skill shortage, if we think about a population that's working that needs to meet a skill over here, employers have also said that to us as we've been travelling around the province, that they need to keep employees and they need to be able to access the ability somehow, to access funds to return to school at the same time.

MR. GOURLEY: I would like a supplemental answer to that one, too, and thank you for reminding me. There is the employer in this who can't be ignored. I think there's going to become an ever-increasing requirement amongst employers to support further education and retraining. I think they're going to have to come to the table around that question with funding, not just with, oh, yes, I want my workers to be upgraded or up-skilled. They're going to have to say, gee, I'm willing to pay part of the tuition, I'm willing to give paid time off, I'm willing to do other kinds of things in order to engender that culture of ongoing

education and learning. I think there are many employers who are now doing it - the Government of Nova Scotia being one of them.

MR. PARKER: I would like to follow up again around this EI sponsorship question. Do you know what percentage of your students, Joan, at community college would have sponsorship from HRDC?

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: I was going to look at Sara, who I didn't introduce earlier. I don't know that statistic off the top of my head, the percentage. We have a lot of sponsored students, there's no question about it, but in terms of the general population, the percentage point, I don't know. One of the interesting policy things, going back to your gender question in some ways, you cannot get EI sponsorship to take an on-line program and I think that this is a profound issue for some people, in particular single mothers.

MR. GOURLEY: If you want, I have the payer versus the non-payer.

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: Do you, okay.

MR. GOURLEY: Of the 10,000 students, 9,800 roughly that you have, 6,400 are payers and the rest are non-payers. So they would be supported by either the provincial or federal purse.

MR. PARKER: So about two-thirds/one-third then by the sound of it roughly?

MR. GOURLEY: Yes, roughly.

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: You see, we don't have tuition for adult learning programs, so you can't relate it directly to the sponsorship.

MR. PARKER: I certainly see it as a roadblock for some young people out there who really need that sponsorship in order to be able to take further training because they're locked in with obligations now. If they're in a job that is not seasonal, therefore they never get laid off, they're never eligible for sponsorship. They're almost stuck in a rut, they're getting a low wage and they're going to continue that.

[10:15 a.m.]

Again, there are student loans, but they have a car payment, power bills and things to pay this month and next month, and they can't afford to go from what they're doing to take training without sponsorship. They just can't seem to get it.

MR. GOURLEY: There is another wrinkle to this too, and Joan and I have talked about this. Over time, the delivery model will become much different. I envision somewhere

down the road we would get to a place where a vast majority of the delivery would be a non- 9 to 5, Monday to Friday place. It would be evenings, outside of the regular work time in order to allow attendance while also working.

MR. PARKER: That might be an option. Thank you.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Mr. Gaudet.

MR. WAYNE GAUDET: I want to focus a little bit on the tradespeople shortage. Everyone is aware of the out-migration of many Nova Scotians, who leave our communities to head out West. In our community, just recently I heard of a contractor heading out West with his crew, he's being offered $80 an hour. Hard to pass that one up. The shipyard at home is losing many welders. I'm just curious, do we know how many people are heading out West? What specifically are we doing to try to help employers find replacement workers? It's hard when you have orders on the book and you have to deliver and all of a sudden you're losing a couple of welders or a few workers. So are we doing anything, are we sort of keeping an eye on this?

MR. GOURLEY: A couple of things. The attractiveness of the $80 an hour, we'll never get around. It's going to happen.

In terms of trades skill shortages - I'll go through this in a particular order for a reason - again, I have to qualify that and say you have to be careful when using those words because if you went to one sector of the economy, they would say there's no shortage here at all, in fact I have unemployed tradespeople. If you go to another sector, they'll say they can't get people at all. It's a little bit of a balancing act - we have the conundrum of these shortages while also having an unemployment rate in a particular area of the province that can run anywhere from 8 per cent to 17 per cent. So there's a bit of a conundrum.

In terms of encouragement, part of that is getting information out to employers that these people are in fact graduating and are available. There's also a requirement or a need for the employers to actively go into the college and recruit. One of the Alberta stories that I can tell is, the most recent graduating class of welders was completely recruited, before they graduated, by an Alberta company that came out here, walked into the classroom, interviewed everybody and said I'll take you all.

There wouldn't be anything preventing one of our own employers from doing that. They have to get into the mindset of recognizing that Joan is putting the product out there, but you can't just expect it to show up at your front door, you have to actively go in and recruit. That information needs to be made available from the perspective that they're able to do that and we encourage them to do that. We want them to do that. That way, I think we'll mitigate some of what's going on.

In terms of labour market information - when you talk about skill shortages, that's the way I talk about skill shortages - the main metric that we have for measuring whether there's a skill shortage is the relative impact on what's called the relative wage, is your general wage being forced up through a shortage? That's what happens in a supply-demand model, and in fact that has not happened in Nova Scotia. There has been no impact on the relative wage that we can yet measure.

That begs in my mind two questions. Is the metric wrong? I'm not an economist, I'm not a statistician or an actuary, so I won't go there. The second part is, do we really have yet a skill shortage? My own comeback to that is, I think in some areas we have pending skill shortages, but worse, we have skill mismatches. So we have an employer - and I'll take the health sector because it's one of the areas that is trending to skill shortages - they're looking for people and there are lots of unemployed people, but not with the right skills to match.

So what are we doing to move those people from that state to where they can attach to this need? We're beginning to recognize that's an absolute requirement to put into place systems which would flow people into the types of lab tech and other types of training that is offered at the college in order to meet that shortage. That's the kind of response I have to that question.

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: As we move forward over the next 18 months, we're looking to be a little more systematic with how employers access the college. The college has been in kind of a production mode - we do our work and then an employer picks up our graduates and goes on. We do a lot of career fairs and those kinds of things now, but we're not attaching employers to our possible graduates - by class, by sector - on a very systematic way. I think that would help employers to know that they can come on the 19^th Tuesday of a program and interview every single welder and see if they can retain those welders into their employment.

This, of course, is what the Dexter Institute does remarkably well. The Dexter Institute hires the employees, sends them to us for education, retains them as employees all the time they're with us, and they return, of course, to Dexter.

I think we're going to try to be a little more systematic about that and perhaps work with employers as well for employers to be able to talk about the whole piece of work- I think people translate just the wage as work - and what it is people package together in terms of a lifestyle and ability to work.

So I think - as Stu said earlier - the economy cycles through time. I think NSCC has a responsibility to educate for Canada and for the world. Our Centre for Geographic Sciences, for example, our graduates go all over the world and do amazing kinds of work and take Nova Scotia with them. I think we have that responsibility and a responsibility to help

local Nova Scotia employers get attached early to students. We're looking at some strategies where we might be able to do that more than we have.

MR. GAUDET: I had a few more questions on that but I think, due to the time, I'm going to run on a couple of others. Doctor, in your presentations you made reference to changes needed to EI policies to allow some workers the opportunity for retraining. Recently, a young individual - I consider him young, he's in his late 30s and has been working in the fish plant for about 20 years - he indicated at one time it was full-time employment and now, with the downturn in the fisheries, there are weeks when there's no work. So for him to try to pay his bills at the end of the week, he has to consider looking at some retraining. I know he has been speaking with Human Resources - I'm just curious, with the college, what kinds of negotiations or discussions are carried out between EI or Human Resources and the college?

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: From a student perspective, a student comes to our Centre for Student Success and we help them through - whether it's bursary, scholarship, provincial loan, federal funding and so on - from an individual level. For a policy level, just recently the Atlantic community colleges had an opportunity to present to the federal Standing Committee on Finance, prior to government changing, and put this issue before them about some policies - that you can't access EI for education if you're underemployed and so on. I think in a skills shortage those are our policies that are concerning us.

Although their policy is kind of outside our purview, in that sense, we do try to relatively gently push against some of those things because the more opportunities people have, whether it's provincial access to funding to come to college or federal access to funding to come to college, and the more opportunities people have to cross-train and retrain and if they're unemployed, find their way back to college. It answers that skill-shortage question very profoundly, rather than drifting around for awhile, not able to access. From the straight-policy point of view to help the individuals, they come to our student success centres and we walk them through all the different options that are available to them.

MR. GOURLEY: I'm going to regret this as soon as I say this. I happen to be the civil servant responsible for EI in the province in terms of its relationship with the federal government, you're right, and that comes through the LMDA, the Labour Market Development Agreement, and the mechanisms that fall from that. The Labour Market Development Agreement deals with about 30 per cent of the payout under EI, which comes as money into the province to help in the issue of attachment to the labour market for unemployed workers. That's called EI Part II funding, just to get to the technical term.

We are currently in a very frustrating negotiation with the federal government to expand the eligibility from unemployed workers to workers - the working poor and workers at risk. The distinction being workers at risk could be very highly paid, but if your plant is closing it doesn't matter if you're the middle manager or the cleaner, you're equally at risk.

In my three years in government, that negotiation has been ongoing. We think we've made some progress through a mechanism they have signed with three other provinces called the Labour Market Partnership Agreement, which is a subset of that LMDA, which is a much more flexible mechanism and allows us to work with people who are still employed and at risk. So the type of worker that you're describing at a fish plant would be one of those people. Where we are in that negotiation with all the things that are going on, it's very difficult to tell. It might come at us within another six months. It might come at us in six years. It's very difficult to tell, especially with the political situation in Ottawa the way it is.

MR. GAUDET: One last question. Doctor, you indicated the college is offering over 100 programs right now. I was speaking recently with one of my nephews and he indicated he was interested in following a grader operators course. So where is this being offered? I found out the only course available in Canada is in Ottawa. I know there are many factors taken into consideration before the college offers a program. I'm just curious, what determines the college system offering a program here in Nova Scotia?

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: I think there are several factors. One, is a sector, usually, coming to us and saying they have a particular need, and, based on that need, we then begin to look for a market - are there enough people who want to take that particular kind of program to make it viable for us to put it on, on an ongoing basis? Then we look at the other side of the equation, if we begin to produce 20 graduates in such a program every year, is there enough employment for those graduates when they finish with us? So we try to look at all those factors and relationships.

Underneath that, is the capacity to grow and expand. We have, with the help of many of you, the capacity to grow and expand in a limited way every year. So there are always more possible programs than we're able to offer in any given year. We try to look at all the various market factors, particularly the supply and demand chain, if you want to look at it that way. We want to make sure that we're graduating people and there is an opportunity not just for two or three, but for 20 and so on.

We're doing some interesting things with our trades programs in some of our smaller communities. We're experimenting with what we're calling rotating trades, where a community may need 15 plumbers every five years, not 15 plumbers every year, where we're coming into a community and setting up a temporary infrastructure, if you want to look at it that way, providing education and then leaving that community and the next year doing electrical instead. So we're trying to do some of those things, but it's really the market factors that come into play.

[10:30 a.m.]

What's interesting about that is what Mr. Epstein was getting at earlier about moving that out ever so slightly and beginning to look at the trends that aren't quite there and I think

that that's a huge opportunity for us to also stay out on that edge of trend. What it really is is a supply and demand change the sector wanted: are there enough students who want to undertake that occupation for the province and is there work for our graduates, and we take that work for our graduates piece very, very seriously.

MR. GOURLEY: Was that road grader?

MR. GAUDET: Yes. (Interruptions)

MR. GOURLEY: Has to become an employee of Dexter.

MR. GAUDET: Thank you very much.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: I should say I don't think we're going to get to a second round of questioning. We have a couple of people and we have some business for the committee at the end of the meeting. So I would like to allow five or 10 minutes at the end. We'll see.

Mr. Theriault.

MR. HAROLD THERIAULT: Thank you for your presentation, it's very interesting. I'm from the Digby-Annapolis area and it's an area now where 40 per cent of our population are senior people and growing. I just had some neighbours of mine, a 38-year-old young man who was trained here in Nova Scotia to be a carpenter and his wife, a clerical worker who was trained here in Nova Scotia to be a clerical worker. They've got two children, 15 and 14 years old. They just packed up and left for Alberta where he's not going to be a carpenter and she's not going to be a clerical worker. Alberta is going to take him out there, possibly pay his way, and train him to do whatever he wants, I believe to work in the oil fields or the oil sands. Right now she's just going to go to work at one of the big grocery stores where she's going to make $10,000 more than she was here. He'll pretty near triple his money to what he was making. What a waste that was, you know, to train those people to be a carpenter and a clerical worker here.

I mean, this is happening and this is going on. This is just one couple, I can name a lot of couples, a lot of singles who have been trained by this province and yet are going to Alberta to be trained to do what they want to do and maybe some will use the training out there. Has this province ever thought of some kind of partnership with a province like Alberta that's sending people money back every year from a surplus? We're losing our population, turning into elderly people, and we're going in debt further every day. Has anything like that ever been thought about or studied by this province with the education program?

MR. GOURLEY: I'm not sure I quite understand your question, Mr. Theriault, but let me take a shot at answering it and you can tell me if it meets the requirement. We have never, ever spoken to the Government of Alberta and said can we get into any kind of a partnership around education other than the normal types of transfers for institutions, but what we are looking at is, where companies are coming to us and doing the hiring of a whole class, we're going to that company and we're saying will you keep track of these people for us so that when our economy heats up, we are able to go to them and repatriate them.

In most cases we're quite successful at that because you need to recognize that these oil companies and the people who are paying these big wages now clearly understand the economic cycle and they know fairly soon, or relatively soon in economic trends, there will be a settling out and that will cool off. So these people will become unemployed in Alberta. At that time, one would hope our economy is on the way up and we would have, if you will, an inventory of people who we could then repatriate. That's the only kind of discussion we've had around people leaving the province, but it's with individual companies because they are the people who will have to keep track of these workers and where they are in order to keep our databases where they should be.

You termed this gentleman leaving a waste. I guess you would have to look at it from his perspective and say, I'm getting a lot more money in my pocket. I'm not going to have provincial sales tax, I'm going to have a lower relative provincial income tax. So from his perspective it's not a waste and that's the conundrum between public policy and individual decisions, so there's not much we can do there.

The aging population in your area will, in and of itself, sustain itself over time. There is an industry that will build in our province around service to the aging population. So it's not such a terrible thing that our population is aging, we just need to make sure we have enough young people in order to support that and in order to support the economy that supports that. So over time I think you will see a correction in that.

MR. THERIAULT: I didn't say it was a waste to the individual. I said it was a waste - it costs us $100,000, in this province, to put a child through Grade 12 and then it costs another $30,000 to $50,000 to train them to work. That's a lot of Nova Scotians' tax dollars, and then we send them off to another province where they prosper. I can see the oil sands of Alberta being there for a long, long while. I'm not talking about a waste here. I'm just talking about a loss, a loss to this province.

MR. GOURLEY: Right, it's a loss of an individual.

MR. THERIAULT: Maybe we should become just a training province because we certainly have the facilities and the expertise, and we become a retirement province. To look at the forestry that was mentioned, that's going to boom, as someone mentioned earlier, the fishery is certainly not going to boom anymore, resource sectors are not good. So we have

to certainly look at something in this province that we can prosper from and if we can educate children to send them wherever, I think that's something we should be looking into. Thank you.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much. Dr. Hamm, did you have any questions this morning?

DR. JOHN HAMM: Yes, thank you, Madam Chairman. First of all, thank you for being here this morning. I've had an opportunity to listen to some good discussion and some of my intervention will be simply comment, but I do have a couple of questions that I think are relevant.

First of all, I would make a comment that call centre employment or information services employment in rural Nova Scotia is not in the same realm as retail employment or hospitality industry employment. If you go to rural Nova Scotia - look at Register.com at one end of the province, Converges at the other, or in my community, Converges and ICT - first of all the employees have good benefits, they have a retirement program and for almost all of them, a level of income that is far superior to what they were experiencing before. So the rural economy has benefited greatly from information services employment. There is always the issue as to the suitability of everybody to be in a particular industry, and the people in our community who are leaving the information services employment are people who simply don't want to work at a computer all day. There are many choices that we all have to make in terms of the kind of employment that we're going to seek over a lifetime.

The community college has played a huge role in the success of these industries in rural Nova Scotia, and they wouldn't be there in rural Nova Scotia if it wasn't for the services of the community college to take people without the proper skill sets and to very quickly make them adaptable to go into information services employment, so I don't disassociate myself from your comments on the retail or hospitality industry sector, but I do on the information services sector. It's very important to the rural economy and it does provide very good employment.

Howard, in terms of your comments about anticipatory planning, I think you're right on the money, as long as you don't get out too far in front because if you're too far in front, it's very, very difficult to convince people to take training if the job is 10 years down the road. We've done a bit of that in our training for people who were anticipating a more rapid introduction of natural gas in the communities of the province. So, in reality, I don't disagree with your comment, but the college can't be too far in front or you're going to be training people for jobs that are too far down the road.

My comment on the Alberta economy is simply - the thing that Albertans did right was to settle over the oil. As long as the energy sector is as strong as it is, we will face that pressure from Alberta, and the tar sands and the resources they have are going to drive their

economy as long as the price of energy stays where it is. If we find the 40 trillion cubic feet of natural gas offshore that we're being told is there, we'll be in the same boat. They'll all come back here for the good jobs. I hope that I live long enough to see that happen here in Nova Scotia. It would be a great time to be in government.

In terms of a comment, I participated in a series of consultations that the college is just wrapping up, and they did this around the province. One of the comments I think is relevant , for example in my area, there should be a natural relationship between St. F.X. and the Pictou Campus, the Port Hawkesbury Campus, there should be a natural relationship between Marconi and UCCB, certainly a natural relationship between Kingstec and Acadia, and COGS and Acadia. One of the topics that we discussed at this round of consultations that the college had was where the college will be. I can't remember what year it was now.

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: In the year 2012 and beyond.

DR. HAMM: It was 2012 and beyond. Well, what I think has to happen is a serious integration between the universities and the Nova Scotia Community College. I think there should be combined training, that you can come out of the combined training with a degree; you come out of the combined training with skills that allow you to get a job. I think all of us have come to the conclusion that a B.A. today doesn't really get you a job. I see people at our community college, after they get their B.A., they are coming to the community college to get the skill sets they need to enter the employment market. I don't think it's a bad relationship to have, that is a B.A. and a diploma from a community college, but I think there has to be a better way to do it. I would like to see the people of northern Nova Scotia accessing the community college and the university in a combined way, and I would hope in 2012 we'll have that kind of a relationship.

My question is, because we looked at the 58 per cent of high school graduates who disappear and - well, I know where a lot of them go, some of them stay and are underemployed. Some of them go to the tar sands and make big money, huge money. Can we speak a little bit about how we can influence young people, how the college can, how the department can influence the choices that young people are making in the public school system so they make the right choice first off?

Charlie made a comment about people who find themselves in the wrong vocation. I see people who are now training for their fourth vocation. They love training, but they never quite find their niche. Part of that is making the right choice first, and can we do a better job in influencing the choices that people make before they leave the public school system, first of all, to make the right choice, but also to make the immediate choice. I talk to too many graduates who are telling me, well, I'm going to work a couple of years and then I'll decide on something. Far too many of them put off their training, and waste years, and some of them never really get back to where they have to be to get the training. I think intervention in the

high schools, or even perhaps before high school, is critical if we're going to allow young people to make the best first choice. Can we talk a bit about that?

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: Maybe I'll start on this one. Going full circle, in some ways to the early questions, I think this is a critical piece for young people to experiment with, the possibility of their future, whether it's the opportunity to sit in a recording booth, make a 10-minute film, care for an elderly person, or string a bead in welding, the opportunity to experiment with what the possibilities are is there - I think there is an enormous opportunity to do that and the college really wants to be involved in that.

[10:45 a.m.]

I think there are a couple of other pieces around language - and I'm always fascinated by how we use language. A high school guidance counsellor said this to me when we've been out consulting about our next strategic plan, she said even if in the P-12 system we changed our language and began to talk about when you go to post-secondary, and not if you go to post-secondary, what a profound message that would be to young people.

The other one I think is to help young people realize that it's their next thing, it's the next step - it is not a life decision they are making, they will not necessarily do that thing all of their lives, they are making the next decision to do something they are interested in, not a life decision that will keep them necessarily in one occupation.

I always laugh when I think about that next step because at 17 years of age I didn't think I was going to be a college president; it wasn't on my list. So if we think about that for young people now, it's the next step they're taking. I think there are some powerful things a college can do with the P-12 system to help kids experiment in the possibilities of life. I think that's really what we need to be helping them do.

MR. GOURLEY: I think your focus on the P-12 system around career counselling and the information that goes to students, and also underexposure to workplaces and to be able to go out and taste, if you will, test drive various occupations, is a great way to do that. I remember going to the graduation at Auburn with Dennis and a young lady came up to him and said, I did my co-op this year in teaching and I never ever want to be a teacher, ever - and Dennis was quite taken aback by that, as you can imagine. We both realized that, in fact, that was the best thing that she could have said because, God forbid, she would go through four years of university, enter the classroom and suddenly discover this wasn't for her.

The idea that we would expose high school students to co-op, to the O2 program which would give them work-based experience and to engender a connection, a blurring of those lines between the college and the high school system is exactly what we need to do.

The second piece of it is around career counselling. We need to support the career counsellors in the P-12 system to get beyond what they're struggling with now, and that is a question of are they career counsellors, are they social counsellors, are they health counsellors - they have quite a menu of things they have to do and I think we need to separate that a little bit and support them in coming to the conclusion that, one - as Joan was alluding to - you no longer train for 'this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life' but rather it's a set of progressions; and, two, there is a menu of post-secondary options available, not just one. You don't have to go to university and that's the only course to success both economically and socially, that in fact going to college is a first choice, that in fact going into an apprenticeship is a first choice - getting that message out there - that's where the department can work in terms of exposure, in terms of changing the type of provision of education to O2 , to co-op and to connection with the college.

I've sort of facetiously - but not quite so facetiously - said that there should be an NSCC office in every high school in the province, which I think would be a good thing to do. I don't think we could get the resources to do that, but I think it would be a very good thing.

To go to another facet of the question you asked, Dr. Hamm, and that is I'm not sure high school is early enough, I think it's the end of junior high or even the beginning of junior high where we need to intervene. Once you get to high school you're almost on a path because of the way we structure the high school system, the curriculum, the course selection and all the rest of it. You're almost committed, once you're in Grade 10, to a certain pathway - I think we need to correct that perhaps a little earlier in the system.

DR. HAMM: That's interesting. Career changes - I recently had an opportunity to provide some assistance to a constituent whose mother was a teacher and whose father was a police officer. She went to university and became qualified as a teacher, taught for a few years and now wants to become a police officer - obviously she was influenced more by her mother than her father in career choice - and now she's off taking police officer training. So it's a serious disruption in life if in fact you don't make the right first choice.

The other thing that has come up here as part of the discussion, we talked about tuition rates at university and we talked about tuition rates at the Nova Scotia Community College, bearing in mind that they are onerous. On the university side, we are the highest in the undergraduate community; the community college, we're middle of the pack or slightly above. However, on the student loan side there is some way in which we protect the taxpayer in that if you commit to staying in the province, at least on the Nova Scotia part of your student loan, you can have over 50 per cent of it forgiven, and that's a good thing.

On the other hand, let's think about others that aren't in the Student Loan Program. If you become a physician, you pay a tuition of about $12,000 a year. Your annual cost of training is over $60,000, borne by the taxpayer. If you do an undergraduate program,

depending on which university you go to, 40 or 50 per cent of your cost is borne by the taxpayer, it's not borne by your tuition. Shouldn't we have some kind of way in which those who don't use their training in the province are indebted to the investment that the province had made? Alberta, for example, could afford - and we talk about Alberta and the great wealth there and it's a great talking point; however, it's not reflected in other provinces, what's going on in Alberta. We have to look seriously at the investment that we make in young people and the portability that they have.

We have traditionally been a training ground for other jurisdictions and maybe we should look more aggressively at saying, look, if you stay in Nova Scotia, that's great, but if you don't stay in Nova Scotia, maybe there is an indebtedness that you take on, by taking the training that was paid for, partly by the Nova Scotia taxpayer, and taking it to another jurisdiction. I mean, it's nice to be benevolent, but taxpayers have ideas where money should be spent and maybe they should be given some options as to where their money is going to be spent. Making a big investment in a young person who stays here is one thing, making a huge taxpayer investment in a young person who will never ever be back to Nova Scotia is another thing. This is something we have to look at, I think, very carefully.

There hasn't been a huge discussion on that particular issue, but I think at some point we have to look at it, particularly here in Nova Scotia where we are becoming a training ground, and we do it very well, I don't see that changing. As a matter of fact, with the improvements in our programing and the facilities in our community college and the reputation that our universities are developing, it will probably be an issue that will grow rather than shrink.

I think we have to be very careful when we address the whole issue of how we're paying for post-secondary education and what it means from a societal point of view. I know that is a little beyond the decision making right now of the department, but it sits very much within the realm of the rest of us who are sitting around this table. It's a very complicated issue that we're dealing with here in Nova Scotia and I like the idea that we will be a training ground for others, but I think there's a limit beyond which the taxpayer shouldn't be forced to carry all of that burden, and that's what's happening right now.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much, that's great. I have some questions but I'm going to limit myself to just one, if I may. I know we started five minutes late so I'm going to ask for the indulgence of our committee as well. On the question of student loans, I think it's important to mention that student loans are geared for kids who come straight out of high school and go straight to college or university, and if they take time off and go to work and earn money - and I'm going back to Mr. Parker's comments about somebody who gets a little established and starts to earn some money - they're then not eligible. They're supposed to be saving on their minimum wage, or slightly above minimum wage jobs, to pay for their tuition and the other costs of going back to university and I'm sure I'm not alone as an MLA, having seen people come into my office who have not been able to access any

student loans and, therefore, can't go. They have acceptances to programs and they can't go because of the very fact that they've kept an apartment, they're not living with their mother and father anymore, they've had expenses and they've not been able to save.

So I'm sure you're both aware of it, but I think it's worth mentioning that the Student Loan Program doesn't address the needs, particularly of those students who may be returning to education, and many of them are probably the students you're seeing at the community college. So I don't expect an answer, but I think it's important that we put that on the record that the program isn't really properly designed for the retraining that we're looking at or the initial training of today.

The question I thought I would go to, out of the number I have here, would be back to the employer and the employer's responsibility. We saw your chart vis-à-vis the rest of the world that Canada doesn't invest as much, or Canadian employers don't invest as much in that. Are there incentives that are being looked at to encourage employers to do more on-the-job training - and that can be everything from literacy, because you made the connection between literacy and productivity. We stand in a very poor position in terms of literacy even within Canada. Far too many of our people don't have the basic literacy skills, so are there ways we can encourage employers to begin to offer that training?

MR. GOURLEY: Well, there are two pieces to your question. One is the literacy question and those essential skills and, in fact, the province does do a fair bit of work directly with employers around that issue through our workplace education system whereby we do subsidize the employer to provide literacy training in the work site while the employee is still being paid. So we do that.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: You do subsidize, okay.

MR. GOURLEY: In terms of encouraging employers, incentives for employers, we are looking at some fiscal arrangements that we could make relative to how to support employers who are going to take on apprentices, but that's at early stages. In terms of tuition and the types of benefits that employers might offer to an engaged worker, our efforts have been restricted to simply going to employers and saying you can't simply cry about the problem, you have to invest in the solution to the problem, and that is supporting workers either by allowing them time off in order to go to post-secondary, by providing payments to support tuition or books or other types of expenses, perhaps even providing some type of child care that would allow employees to do that. So that's the limit of what we've done so far.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much. I don't think time allows us to explore that more, but it is a very interesting subject.

MR. GOURLEY: It is.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: And on behalf of the committee, I would like to thank both of you for a very in-depth look at some of the issues that are surrounding our skill shortages and I think we're all better informed now. I'll ask the committee to stay in place so we can deal with a couple of business matters as well. Thank you again.

DR. MCARTHUR-BLAIR: Thank you.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: No time for closing remarks. Let's just have a look at our agenda.

The first thing on our agenda here is to have the election of a vice-chairman. Mr. Epstein, if you would.

MR. EPSTEIN: I would like to nominate Mark Parent to be vice-chairman of the committee.

MR. HINES: I'll second that.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Would all those in favour of the motion please say Aye. Contrary minded, Nay.

The motion is carried.

Congratulations, Mr. Parent.

MR. PARENT: Thank you very much, Madam Chairman.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Then I believe, Mr. Gaudet, you have a comment.

MR. GAUDET: I want to raise this matter. I've been on this committee for quite some time. The practice of this committee used to be that we would meet once a month. With the former chairman, a few emergency meetings came up and we decided to meet twice a month. Then I understand - and I'm going back - there were some groups on the order paper and we decided, in order to try to bring these groups in, we continued to meet twice a month. I understand we have three groups that are already booked to come in and I also recognize at times there's a need for emergency meetings.

[11:00 a.m.]

I would like to make a motion and maybe get some feedback, I would like to move that this committee move back to one meeting a month. As I've stated earlier, recognizing there are already three groups that have been booked, to respect that schedule, Madam Chairman. At the same time, if there's a need that does come up, certainly I have no

hesitation for this committee to meet more than once, if needed, in any given month. So I would like for this committee to consider moving back to meeting once a month.

MR. HINES: I second the motion.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Thank you. Any comments? Mr. Epstein.

MR. EPSTEIN: I'm sorry we're faced with a hard motion on something that might usefully be discussed in a more flexible way before we get to it, but I think we'll take it just as an opportunity to chat about this.

I don't know that we actually have moved in any kind of an official way to twice-a-month meetings. I think what's happened is that we have a flexible approach. Like most committees, we tend not to meet in the Summer unless there's something particular that's pressing. In the Fall, it often takes a while to get going and agree on what the agenda is. There are often breaks near the end of the calendar year and of course when the Legislature is sitting, there are sometimes difficulties in getting committees together to meet more frequently or meet any more than once a month, sometimes less frequently than that.

I think what's important is that we get through a reasonable agenda during the course of a year. Sometimes that means we meet a couple of times a month, sometimes it means that a couple of months go by. The question really is when we look back over a year, have we covered a reasonable number of topics that are necessary for us to deal with in order to engage with the problems that exist around the province?

I would really be sorry to move in the direction of trying to judge in advance how often we need to meet. I'm sure that it's contemplated that if necessary we could always change our minds. If we tried to set a rule for ourselves that actually was a rule, it would tend to be a little problematic. I tend to see this motion as an observation that it might be too much to move to twice a month all the time. I would certainly agree with that. Twice a month all the time is probably too much.

In terms of how we proceed, I think we could probably live without a rule and continue to discuss our schedule amongst ourselves as we do our agenda setting from time to time. I think that has generally worked quite well. At the same time, I understand the point, particularly for members who travel from out of town, this is problematic and it's not always easy if they're not available, to find substitutes to come to the committee. I understand that practical problem.

MR. HINES: Madam Chairman, in seconding the motion, I understand completely where the mover is coming from. I don't see it as being restrictive as to what we do, but it does set a set of rules that were not perceived by anybody as sitting biweekly. It makes that a standard assumption and it makes it a regulation and more forceful.

If you look at the list of those we have coming in, certainly they're all important. They deem themselves as being important, we accept that, they are important, but there's a difference between important and an emergency situation. I think the motion reflects that, that we have a standard meeting time and then we do move to emergency as opposed to leaving it wide open for whoever may deem something important to solely have that place in the agenda. So I think it controls the agenda and it controls the meeting time. I think we need those controls.

MR. THERIAULT: I believe when we first set our agenda for this committee, it was to meet once a month - I believe we can go back in Hansard and find that out - and if anything was pushing or pressing and we thought we had to meet more, we could meet twice or however many times a month, but the original agreement was once a month.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Mr. Epstein.

MR. EPSTEIN: Did I mishear the motion? I thought I heard the word "rule" in there somewhere. If it's a question of understanding that in general we would meet once a month, no problem, but if it really was meant to be a rule - which I kind of thought I heard there - I think that's where we cross a line and unnecessarily bind ourselves. But if there was a different intention I'm happy to go along with it.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Okay, that's very good. You're happy to have the motion put on the floor - it has been seconded - and we'll vote on it?

MR. EPSTEIN: Yes. I don't know if the exact wording came out there, but if it's as a general guideline that we would normally meet once a month, fine.

MR. GAUDET: Is there a need for a motion? I think there is, just for everyone's understanding, to try to provide a little bit of guidance to the committee and to the clerk. My motion was simply that I would like to move that this committee move back to meeting once a month, and that was it. At the same time, in recognition of my motion, I understand there are pressing needs that come on the radar at times, and certainly this committee can do as it has done in the past.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Is there any further comment? Would all those in favour of the motion please say Aye. Contrary minded, Nay.

The motion is carried.

I think that just recognizes that we have fallen into a pattern of meeting every two months and now we'll be more conscious (Interruption) Sorry, every two weeks. We'll be more conscious of trying to cut that down.

On the upcoming meeting dates, I just wanted to make a clarification around the Clearwater employees. We discussed them last month, and they are scheduled for April 20^th, but in fact it does not have to do with Glace Bay and the labour issue that's in Glace Bay, it relates to North Sydney. They described to us that their need was to talk about licensing and about what's caught and where it's processed. So it's a little bit of a different issue. Anyway, we had agreed last month to see them and they are scheduled for our next meeting, followed by Pork Nova Scotia and then the Boat Credit Facility Program, which is the Office of Economic Development. So those are our next three.

Could I have a motion to adjourn?

MR. PARENT: So moved.

MADAM CHAIRMAN: Thank you. The meeting is adjourned.

[The committee adjourned at 11:08 a.m.]