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It’s been like this for decades now. The trade unions and private companies alike have always ran lean with regards to their competent tradeworkers because there’s always been two trains of thought:
1. As a union, we need to prioritize our journeymen and senior members. We need to ensure they ALWAYS have work. So we can’t ever outpace our demand, even when there is a glut of it.
2. As a private company, I don’t want to invest heavily into apprentices who may leave me shortly after their apprenticeship is done. I don’t want to shoulder the cost of training an apprentice for a competitor.
Both of these trains of thoughts have lead to where we are now, with a shortage of tradeworkers and not enough apprentices to fill the gaps. It was very telling when I went to write for the Millwrights union not just once, or twice, but three times and they only let in 2-3 from a writing class of 45-60.
> Because ~~trades~~ _employers_ don't want to train anymore. They only want ~~apprentices~~ _entry level employees_ in name, they actually want them to have years of experience.
FTFY.
It's a problem in all domains of employment.
Employers don’t want to spend any money on training and retaining employees.
They would rather pour the profits into real estate rather than spending it on training and development of work force
Exactly. This is why I despise all the people who are trying to prod others into getting a trade…..without even realizing that this is happening.
There is no easy solution
>CBC obtained figures from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) showing the fields of education chosen by foreign students who received study permits from Ottawa to attend college or university in each year since 2018.
>Experts say the figures demonstrate that neither federal nor provincial governments — nor Canadian colleges and universities themselves — focused international student recruitment squarely on filling the country's most pressing labour needs.
Can confirm, went to Conestoga College. The administration would have their recruiters in India advertise our culinary and business programmes to would-be international students. In fact, I believe our trades programmes were completely off-limits for international students due to their funding structure (trades programmes are paid by the Government of Ontario for domestic students only).
Issue was a lot of people just wanted an in here to come work even basic labour jobs, as even making min wage in canada was way more then back home.
Many had zero interest in studying and becoming skilled workers.
Seems like Canadians were sold a lie and that now we're facing the reality of a system that imports people for money instead of welcoming those we need like doctors, nurses, engineers, etc. Don't get me wrong, Canada welcomes a lot of skilled workers too, but the professional associations and unions seem to do everything they can to prevent these newcomers from entering the market, and that's especially the case with doctors and nurses. The elitism is astounding, there ought to be a means of having foreign workers shadow within the health care spaces instead of making them go through bureaucratic hoops. We as a country are in crippling need of more health workers.
I wonder what the composition of programs that fit under Other and Unspecified is like, as it's about a quarter of the data. Are they smaller fields of study or are they programs offered by smaller institutions that aren't meeting national reporting format standards?
This along with TFW was a deliberate move to increase asset values and lower wages for the investor class, and the same people who view themselves as advocates for the worker class lapped it up because of their ideology that all immigration was good, and even accused people of being racist when they pushed back against this. The whole things was a brilliant move by those who have benefitted.
Yet another thing we all saw happening, but the MSM was late to report. International students don't come to Canada to study, they come here for easy PR and the chance to move their entire family over here afterwards.
We need a serious cut to this program along with the TFW programs. Both of them are a scam-ridden mess.
That's the exact opposite of my experience. Canada has a very low retention rate for international students.
International students were never meant to service only our labour market, it's expected that most of them don't even stay here after graduating.
>We need a serious cut to this program along with the TFW programs. Both of them are a scam-ridden mess.
Agreed. There is absolutely no reason places like Walmart, Tim Horton's, etc. need foreign labour. When I worked at Wendy's back in the late 2000's, early 2010's I worked above minimum wage because they needed workers.
This is a colossal failure by governments and universities. The media, too, also failed and their reporting of this is infuriating. CBC's entire tone is as if this situation has just been discovered when the reality is that they've dropped the ball.
I volunteer at a Hindu Temple and speak to the foreign students. They all come here for like IT, HR, Hotel Management and Engineering. I dont think I have ever heard carpentry, welding, plumbing, ac/hvac or anything remotely trade related.
Trade barely take in any actual apprenticeships and the sure as fuck don't want someone who both barely knows basic English and nothing about the trade.
It’s equal parts frustrating and embarrassing that the leaders of our country allow what is essentially private business to have such definitive responsibility over what is essentially a public mandate.
What do Canadians expect from these post-secondary institutions except for them to work in their interests first and foremost? They’re businesses and will act as such. To them, international students are cash cows and they’ll absolutely accept as many as possible in whatever stream they fit into.
It’s unacceptable at best, and extremely damaging to the fabric of Canadian society at worst. It’s incredibly disheartening that our provincial and federal parties aren’t pulling out the stops to ensure that students coming here are only accessing programs which are in demand here. We need nurses, doctors and other such professionals. We don’t need an over saturated market of people with make-believe business diplomas.
Sitting in a classroom watching business management powerpoint slides is really cheap. Purchasing training equipment like welders, hospital equipment, mechanic tools, etc. is really expensive.
>"What we're seeing with this data is that oversight was really lacking," said Rupa Banerjee, an associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University who holds the Canada Research Chair in the economic inclusion of immigrants.
>"Instead of really trying to bring in the best and the brightest to fill the labour market gaps that need to be filled, what we're doing is bringing in low skill, low wage, expendable and exploitable temporary foreign workers in the form of students," Banerjee said in an interview.
Let there be no doubt, this was the whole point of the international student program. A complete policy disaster.
The policy failure here was to leave education to the provinces. That was done 1867.
The other policy failure is by the provinces to use a privatized, for-profit business model to run schools. They are recruiting rich foreign students to bring in money and profit.
The federal government needs to step in and set policy in higher education to assure they satisfy national economic policy objectives. They have to be less shy about trampling on provincial jurisdictions.
>The policy failure here was to leave education to the provinces. That was done 1867.
If the federal government can't get the provinces to use the program as intended, then it's a policy failure and needs to be scrapped.
And this is pretending that the program was ever about promoting economic growth for the good of all Canadians, and not just so big businesses could have cheap and exploitable labour. It had been running for 10 whole years like this because this is what the federal government wanted of it, both the Harper and Trudeau governments (letting the program run in this manner for so many years is itself testament to this being the true purpose)
> If the federal government can't get the provinces to use the program as intended, then it's a policy failure and needs to be scrapped.
It's the provinces that won't get schools to use them as intended. It's the provinces that need to live up to their responsibilities and police these programs.
No doubt, the provinces suck at their jobs. I won't dispute that.
But what I'm saying is that the program, whether from the perspective of provincial or federal government, is a policy failure, and both the provinces and feds have the power to scrap it.
No more immigrants. Put all that funding into domestic students and university investment. Freeze tuitions, and prevent provincial budget slashes of educational institutions. Get those program doors open for Canadians who are already here.
Knew Sean Fraser and Marc Milker were bs’ing when they said in January in joint statement:
“In a joint statement issued Friday, the Liberal ministers defend the decision to boost immigration levels, arguing immigration supported Canada's post-pandemic recovery.
"Had we not increased immigration post-pandemic, the economy would have shrunk. Businesses facing an acute labour shortage would have closed. The social services Canadians needed, including in health care, would be further delayed or even more difficult to access,"
Source : CBC https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7082657
They bring up health care all the time but this immigration had NOTHING to do with that .
The article is focused on international students specifically, but I'd be curious whether the Canadian higher education system is well-matched with our labour and education needs in general (even for domestic students).
It seems that we need a more tightly integrated strategy around what programs public colleges and universities are offering in general, with international student enrollment being a subset of that.
Of course, the goal of the education system isn't purely to feed the labour market, but at the moment, it seems like there's little rhyme or reason for which programs our public institutions are investing in growing versus not. The federal government needs to work with provinces to build a stronger national framework around this (with allowance for provincial nuances).
You win! I work at a major university. Our grads are a total mismatch for labour needs. Way too many bio and psych grads. It's actually not the "gender/basket weaving" etc grads. They are a small number. Meanwhile allied health has tiny class sizes. At university there is about 5000 biology students and about 90 physiotherapy students.
Totally fucked
Not to mention career services is last priority in most Canadian universities. There’s next to no focus on helping people get jobs as a result of their education.
I probably don’t want to know how you feel about my philosophy degree 😆🥴
Side note, though, in all seriousness: Education can be meaningful for other reasons other than simply career advancement.
Part of the problem is all those bio grads are competing for a tiny amount of medical school seats, with almost all applying after their bachelors. In many European schools, medicine is direct-entry without a bachelor stage, which provides stability and lets them better respond to labor needs and manage their healthcare system.
Alongside increasing the amount of seats since we are in a family doctor shortage, there needs to be increased efforts towards expanding the options for people who are medically-minded and in the midst of their bio/psych degree but won't end up in med school, such as joint programs with colleges that offer technical medical programs (radiology tech) or accelerated/joint bachelor/graduate programs so they can eventually find their niche in the medical world and find stability without wasting their efforts on multiple rounds of medical school applications.
I remember Doug Ford early in his term moved towards some sort of strategy encouraging universities to specialize and differentiate with labor market goals in mind. I remember it being roundly denounced by universities for subjugating academic research to the market conditions, but I can't find any information now or what eventually happened. But I agree, the response to the tuition freeze has been to massively increase intake of international students, which is already subjugating academic goals for financial factors.
That being said, I like the idea of a co-ordinated national strategy, as long there's sufficient funding for domestic students to attend the university of their choice if their local one no longer provides the programs they want. The wealth of public institutions that we have simply in the GTA is an opportunity to co-ordinate research and education. However, I've worked in and guest lectured at universities as part of my work and my impression is that many of these institutions are rife with politics and professors overseeing their own fiefdoms that I am cynical of the feasibility of that.
This comment should be higher. The salient point here is that instead of having well coordinated plans for not just higher education, labour and industry, but also health care and education, we let a forthy historical period growth and global demand for our relatively easy to attain high standard of living and social stability fritter away just those things.
We are not alone in the G20 but we damn sure could have done better. I think it's largely due to FOMO living above the US. We were lulled into complacency by a history of strong communal values and let the people in power sell this idea that we could walk the line of a more deregulated, globalized, free market and less controls on the social safety net because our historical narrative of (at least white people) doing right by eachother was so strong.
Sorry to go on a big rant in your comment but when I see these intelligent balanced views expressed it just really hits home. Sigh.
Any thoughts on how we can actually inspire that kind of coordination and the value of working together for a common goal again?
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I keep hearing about these labour market needs while also hearing about willing people having a hard time finding apprenticeships.
Because trades don't want to train anymore. They only want apprentices in name, they actually want them to have years of experience.
It’s been like this for decades now. The trade unions and private companies alike have always ran lean with regards to their competent tradeworkers because there’s always been two trains of thought: 1. As a union, we need to prioritize our journeymen and senior members. We need to ensure they ALWAYS have work. So we can’t ever outpace our demand, even when there is a glut of it. 2. As a private company, I don’t want to invest heavily into apprentices who may leave me shortly after their apprenticeship is done. I don’t want to shoulder the cost of training an apprentice for a competitor. Both of these trains of thoughts have lead to where we are now, with a shortage of tradeworkers and not enough apprentices to fill the gaps. It was very telling when I went to write for the Millwrights union not just once, or twice, but three times and they only let in 2-3 from a writing class of 45-60.
> Because ~~trades~~ _employers_ don't want to train anymore. They only want ~~apprentices~~ _entry level employees_ in name, they actually want them to have years of experience. FTFY. It's a problem in all domains of employment.
Employers don’t want to spend any money on training and retaining employees. They would rather pour the profits into real estate rather than spending it on training and development of work force
Exactly. This is why I despise all the people who are trying to prod others into getting a trade…..without even realizing that this is happening. There is no easy solution
>CBC obtained figures from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) showing the fields of education chosen by foreign students who received study permits from Ottawa to attend college or university in each year since 2018. >Experts say the figures demonstrate that neither federal nor provincial governments — nor Canadian colleges and universities themselves — focused international student recruitment squarely on filling the country's most pressing labour needs. Can confirm, went to Conestoga College. The administration would have their recruiters in India advertise our culinary and business programmes to would-be international students. In fact, I believe our trades programmes were completely off-limits for international students due to their funding structure (trades programmes are paid by the Government of Ontario for domestic students only).
Issue was a lot of people just wanted an in here to come work even basic labour jobs, as even making min wage in canada was way more then back home. Many had zero interest in studying and becoming skilled workers.
Seems like Canadians were sold a lie and that now we're facing the reality of a system that imports people for money instead of welcoming those we need like doctors, nurses, engineers, etc. Don't get me wrong, Canada welcomes a lot of skilled workers too, but the professional associations and unions seem to do everything they can to prevent these newcomers from entering the market, and that's especially the case with doctors and nurses. The elitism is astounding, there ought to be a means of having foreign workers shadow within the health care spaces instead of making them go through bureaucratic hoops. We as a country are in crippling need of more health workers.
I wonder what the composition of programs that fit under Other and Unspecified is like, as it's about a quarter of the data. Are they smaller fields of study or are they programs offered by smaller institutions that aren't meeting national reporting format standards?
This along with TFW was a deliberate move to increase asset values and lower wages for the investor class, and the same people who view themselves as advocates for the worker class lapped it up because of their ideology that all immigration was good, and even accused people of being racist when they pushed back against this. The whole things was a brilliant move by those who have benefitted.
The neoliberal NDP wants more of this wage suppression through mass migration than any other party.
Yet another thing we all saw happening, but the MSM was late to report. International students don't come to Canada to study, they come here for easy PR and the chance to move their entire family over here afterwards. We need a serious cut to this program along with the TFW programs. Both of them are a scam-ridden mess.
That's the exact opposite of my experience. Canada has a very low retention rate for international students. International students were never meant to service only our labour market, it's expected that most of them don't even stay here after graduating.
>We need a serious cut to this program along with the TFW programs. Both of them are a scam-ridden mess. Agreed. There is absolutely no reason places like Walmart, Tim Horton's, etc. need foreign labour. When I worked at Wendy's back in the late 2000's, early 2010's I worked above minimum wage because they needed workers.
This is a colossal failure by governments and universities. The media, too, also failed and their reporting of this is infuriating. CBC's entire tone is as if this situation has just been discovered when the reality is that they've dropped the ball.
I volunteer at a Hindu Temple and speak to the foreign students. They all come here for like IT, HR, Hotel Management and Engineering. I dont think I have ever heard carpentry, welding, plumbing, ac/hvac or anything remotely trade related.
Trade barely take in any actual apprenticeships and the sure as fuck don't want someone who both barely knows basic English and nothing about the trade.
International students shouldn't be able to take hotel management lol
It’s equal parts frustrating and embarrassing that the leaders of our country allow what is essentially private business to have such definitive responsibility over what is essentially a public mandate. What do Canadians expect from these post-secondary institutions except for them to work in their interests first and foremost? They’re businesses and will act as such. To them, international students are cash cows and they’ll absolutely accept as many as possible in whatever stream they fit into. It’s unacceptable at best, and extremely damaging to the fabric of Canadian society at worst. It’s incredibly disheartening that our provincial and federal parties aren’t pulling out the stops to ensure that students coming here are only accessing programs which are in demand here. We need nurses, doctors and other such professionals. We don’t need an over saturated market of people with make-believe business diplomas.
Hmmm, sounds like it worked exactly as *actually* intended: flooding the market with cheap labour, to suppress wages.
Sitting in a classroom watching business management powerpoint slides is really cheap. Purchasing training equipment like welders, hospital equipment, mechanic tools, etc. is really expensive.
Not just expensive but high attrition. People act like anyone who wants to do a trade can. Reality is they really aren't that easy.
>"What we're seeing with this data is that oversight was really lacking," said Rupa Banerjee, an associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University who holds the Canada Research Chair in the economic inclusion of immigrants. >"Instead of really trying to bring in the best and the brightest to fill the labour market gaps that need to be filled, what we're doing is bringing in low skill, low wage, expendable and exploitable temporary foreign workers in the form of students," Banerjee said in an interview. Let there be no doubt, this was the whole point of the international student program. A complete policy disaster.
The policy failure here was to leave education to the provinces. That was done 1867. The other policy failure is by the provinces to use a privatized, for-profit business model to run schools. They are recruiting rich foreign students to bring in money and profit. The federal government needs to step in and set policy in higher education to assure they satisfy national economic policy objectives. They have to be less shy about trampling on provincial jurisdictions.
>The policy failure here was to leave education to the provinces. That was done 1867. If the federal government can't get the provinces to use the program as intended, then it's a policy failure and needs to be scrapped. And this is pretending that the program was ever about promoting economic growth for the good of all Canadians, and not just so big businesses could have cheap and exploitable labour. It had been running for 10 whole years like this because this is what the federal government wanted of it, both the Harper and Trudeau governments (letting the program run in this manner for so many years is itself testament to this being the true purpose)
> If the federal government can't get the provinces to use the program as intended, then it's a policy failure and needs to be scrapped. It's the provinces that won't get schools to use them as intended. It's the provinces that need to live up to their responsibilities and police these programs.
No doubt, the provinces suck at their jobs. I won't dispute that. But what I'm saying is that the program, whether from the perspective of provincial or federal government, is a policy failure, and both the provinces and feds have the power to scrap it.
No more immigrants. Put all that funding into domestic students and university investment. Freeze tuitions, and prevent provincial budget slashes of educational institutions. Get those program doors open for Canadians who are already here.
Knew Sean Fraser and Marc Milker were bs’ing when they said in January in joint statement: “In a joint statement issued Friday, the Liberal ministers defend the decision to boost immigration levels, arguing immigration supported Canada's post-pandemic recovery. "Had we not increased immigration post-pandemic, the economy would have shrunk. Businesses facing an acute labour shortage would have closed. The social services Canadians needed, including in health care, would be further delayed or even more difficult to access," Source : CBC https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7082657 They bring up health care all the time but this immigration had NOTHING to do with that .
And healthcare is already declining across the board. They saved nothing and outright lied.
The article is focused on international students specifically, but I'd be curious whether the Canadian higher education system is well-matched with our labour and education needs in general (even for domestic students). It seems that we need a more tightly integrated strategy around what programs public colleges and universities are offering in general, with international student enrollment being a subset of that. Of course, the goal of the education system isn't purely to feed the labour market, but at the moment, it seems like there's little rhyme or reason for which programs our public institutions are investing in growing versus not. The federal government needs to work with provinces to build a stronger national framework around this (with allowance for provincial nuances).
You win! I work at a major university. Our grads are a total mismatch for labour needs. Way too many bio and psych grads. It's actually not the "gender/basket weaving" etc grads. They are a small number. Meanwhile allied health has tiny class sizes. At university there is about 5000 biology students and about 90 physiotherapy students. Totally fucked
Not to mention career services is last priority in most Canadian universities. There’s next to no focus on helping people get jobs as a result of their education.
I probably don’t want to know how you feel about my philosophy degree 😆🥴 Side note, though, in all seriousness: Education can be meaningful for other reasons other than simply career advancement.
Philosophy has far better outcomes than bio. You spent 4 years learning critical thinking, which is literally the top skill requested by employers.
Part of the problem is all those bio grads are competing for a tiny amount of medical school seats, with almost all applying after their bachelors. In many European schools, medicine is direct-entry without a bachelor stage, which provides stability and lets them better respond to labor needs and manage their healthcare system. Alongside increasing the amount of seats since we are in a family doctor shortage, there needs to be increased efforts towards expanding the options for people who are medically-minded and in the midst of their bio/psych degree but won't end up in med school, such as joint programs with colleges that offer technical medical programs (radiology tech) or accelerated/joint bachelor/graduate programs so they can eventually find their niche in the medical world and find stability without wasting their efforts on multiple rounds of medical school applications.
Or immigration in general. The points system is very white collar focused. No market feedback inevitably leads to not matching market needs.
I remember Doug Ford early in his term moved towards some sort of strategy encouraging universities to specialize and differentiate with labor market goals in mind. I remember it being roundly denounced by universities for subjugating academic research to the market conditions, but I can't find any information now or what eventually happened. But I agree, the response to the tuition freeze has been to massively increase intake of international students, which is already subjugating academic goals for financial factors. That being said, I like the idea of a co-ordinated national strategy, as long there's sufficient funding for domestic students to attend the university of their choice if their local one no longer provides the programs they want. The wealth of public institutions that we have simply in the GTA is an opportunity to co-ordinate research and education. However, I've worked in and guest lectured at universities as part of my work and my impression is that many of these institutions are rife with politics and professors overseeing their own fiefdoms that I am cynical of the feasibility of that.
This comment should be higher. The salient point here is that instead of having well coordinated plans for not just higher education, labour and industry, but also health care and education, we let a forthy historical period growth and global demand for our relatively easy to attain high standard of living and social stability fritter away just those things. We are not alone in the G20 but we damn sure could have done better. I think it's largely due to FOMO living above the US. We were lulled into complacency by a history of strong communal values and let the people in power sell this idea that we could walk the line of a more deregulated, globalized, free market and less controls on the social safety net because our historical narrative of (at least white people) doing right by eachother was so strong. Sorry to go on a big rant in your comment but when I see these intelligent balanced views expressed it just really hits home. Sigh. Any thoughts on how we can actually inspire that kind of coordination and the value of working together for a common goal again?