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Editorial: Innumeracy devaluing Canada’s talent pool

Refrains of summertime blues around Canada’s talent pool underscore the need to address fundamental education and labour market issues in this country. While B.C.
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Refrains of summertime blues around Canada’s talent pool underscore the need to address fundamental education and labour market issues in this country.

While B.C.’s government recently announced that the provincial nominee immigration program is again accepting applications under a system retooled to bring it into “closer alignment with B.C.’s labour market and economic development priorities,” a Mining Industry Human Resources Council (MiHR) report described that market here and elsewhere across the country as “malfunctioning.”

Key concerns cited in the report: applicants’ skills mismatched with job vacancies, limited labour market participation and mobility of prospective employees and the retirement of older workers.

The human resources challenges facing miners are acute. According to the MiHR report, each mining job vacancy has fewer than three potential applicants across the country. That 1-to-3 ratio compares with a 1-to-6 ratio in other sectors. But the country’s labour market challenges run deeper than those in the mining sector.

A TD Economics report released in December 2013 pointed out that Canada’s literacy and numeracy performance in the most recent Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) survey “was depressing.” According to the survey, youth aged 16 to 24 in Canada were only average in literacy compared with their counterparts in other OECD nations and underperformed them in numeracy. More concerning: the performance for Canadians is getting worse in both categories, which are fundamental to employability, especially in a 21st-century job market demanding more sophisticated skills.

Meanwhile, a University of Calgary white paper points out that there’s now a record gap between the unemployment rate of youth and adults in Canada’s post-recession period.

That, in part, speaks to the employability of upcoming generations, and that, as much as anything in the job market, needs to be addressed by the country’s education and jobs training systems.