Jason Kenney stresses skills development and new website for students to make post-secondary education decisions at Canada 2020

OTTAWA—Employment and Social Development Canada will be launching a website in the next few months to steer students toward the post-secondary education that will land them jobs, Employment Minister Jason Kenney said Thursday.

Repeating a message he’s delivered frequently since returning from a fact-finding skills mission to Germany earlier this year, the employment minister stressed the need for an overhaul of the way Canadians think about post-secondary education.

In his speech to a conference hosted by the progressive think tank Canada 2020, he made it clear the goal isn’t to just copy the German system per se, which sends large numbers of teenagers into apprenticeship programs.

But he did speak with certainty about a more German approach to lowering Canada’s unacceptably high youth unemployment rate — a rate nearly twice as high as the general Canadian population’s.

“We have to do away with this idea that somehow crept into our culture and our educational system a few decades ago, that young people who go to college rather than university — that young people who go into trades or technical vocations as opposed to professions — are somehow pursuing a second-class form of education. That is a terrible lie,” he said.

One way to get over that bias and establish a “parity of esteem,” Kenney argued — again making use of an expression he became fond of in Germany — is to provide better information to students, school counselors, and parents.

Which is where the government’s new website comes in.

“My department will be doing that in a few months. We’re publishing something called Career Choice that will let young folks sort out their employment and income prospects following different kinds of training,” he said.

“There are really good economic opportunities…that’s what we’re going to do with this new online tool, informing the decisions made by high school students,” he later added in French, during a question and answer session following his speech.

That, however, was only half the lesson Kenney learned from the superior German system. The second was the need to insist on Canadian employers taking more responsibility for training.

“In Canada, governments invest more than in virtually any other OECD country in skills development and training, but the private sector is at the bottom of the developed world,” Kenney said, pointing to OECD and Conference Board of Canada data.

Speaking to reporters afterwards, he was even more critical of Canadian companies.

“We’re not going to see a radical transformation of this stuff overnight. It’s about bending the arc in the direction of more employer-led, demand-driven training,” he said.

“But at the end of the day, yes, I’m a Conservative and I stand up in front of business audiences and say, ‘You guys, to some extent, have been freeloading on the public training system and we need to see more businesses put resources into skills development. It’s not acceptable that we are at the bottom end of the OECD.”

That’s something Kenney said will be addressed as his department tackles something else: the embattled Temporary Foreign Worker program.

“Certainly, I say, ‘Don’t come to me and demand temporary foreign workers to address your labour challenges if you’re not showing us how you’re investing in skills development,” he told reporters.

“That’s one of the reforms we’re making in the new TFW program, by the way, they’re going to have file with their applications — transition plans — to show us how much more they’re investing in skills development,” he said.