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From the Toronto Star - http://www.thestar.com/article/184016

Poor called key to filling jobs - New labour pools urged in Canada to fill tomorrow's jobs, and support boomers: Report - Feb 21, 2007 - Louise Brown, Education Reporter

They are the Canadians most often forgotten – aboriginal youth, the poor, the uneducated – yet a new report says they hold the key to this country's economic future and could even provide a surprise labour pool to support baby boomers in their old age.

From carpenters to climate experts, Canada needs more educated workers to fuel our economy and compete in the world, concludes the report by The Canada Millenium Scholarship Foundation, to be released today. But given a falling birth rate, sweeping retirements and the fact two-thirds of middle-income kids already flock to college and university, Canada must tap a new source of educated workers from among those least likely to pursue higher learning: low-income students, aboriginal teens and youth whose parents never went beyond high school, said the report by the federally funded research body.

For the complex jobs of the future, these groups hold the key – despite the often staggering roadblocks they face to learning, said policy analyst Joseph Berger, co-author of the study, called "Why Access Matters."

"Nearly 70 per cent of all new jobs will require some level of post-secondary education. But only 53 per cent of Canadians graduate from college or university, so we've got a gap that needs to be addressed," said Berger.

That's exactly the problem Canada's business gurus tackled yesterday as Microsoft chair Bill Gates addressed the annual Can?Win conference in Ottawa on the topic, "Competing to Win in the Global Economy – Creating a Skilled Workforce to drive Economic Prosperity."

"This is the whole theme everyone's facing – how to move from an economy which didn't have enough jobs for everyone, to one in which we will not have enough people to do all the jobs," said David Stewart-Patterson, executive vice-president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. The council represents the heads of Canada's 150 largest firms.

"We know access to education is a huge part of the answer, not only for the economy, but for social equity. We can't afford to waste a single mind we have in this country."

The report noted that more workers will be needed to support those on pension as Canada's working-age population shrinks and the ranks of seniors grow.

Yet while Canada has led most developed nations for years with our level of post-secondary education, today's report cautions this growth rate has stalled at about 4 per cent per year over the past decade. Other nations are catching up, including Australia (which has grown by 28 per cent), Korea (up 59 per cent), Great Britain (24 per cent) and even tiny Iceland, where post-secondary enrolment has almost doubled.

"Canada needs to grow more people with higher education to remain competitive. But in order to do this, we have to encourage more of those people who are under-represented – and they're the hardest ones to encourage because of the barriers they face," said Berger in an interview.

The report echoes business leaders' growing alarm about Canada's looming shortage of qualified workers, from auditors to auto mechanics – a shortage acknowledged by federal finance minister Jim Flaherty in his last financial statement.

Canada is a leader in overall post-secondary education. But this is driven largely by our robust college systems and not by university achievement, where we stand sixth among developed countries.

Moreover, as Canada's young aboriginal population grows faster than any other group in the country, there is growing pressure to reduce their dropout rate and encourage post-secondary learning, said the report.

Provinces such as Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, with their booming ranks of aboriginal children, must improve levels of native education, not only for the students' benefit, but also for the good of the provincial economies and ultimately, Canada's prosperity.

Only about 28 per cent of Canada's aboriginal youth enrol in college or university by age 20, compared to 60 per cent of non-aboriginal youth, said the report. By age 24, about 40 per cent have enrolled in some form of higher education, compared to 68 per cent of non-aboriginal adults at the same age.

But before boosting the number of First Nations students going to college and university, you must help more of them graduate from high school by tackling the estimated 58 per cent dropout rate on First Nations reserves – a dropout rate twice that of the population at large.

Similarly, a recent Statistics Canada study released earlier this month showed low-income students are less likely to go to university partly because they do worse on their high school report cards and literacy tests. This suggests it's a longer-term problem to resolve.