Kenney charts plan that puts job focus on learning
Vows better results than STEP program
EDMONTON After getting rid of a popular summer employment program in Thursday’s budget, Premier Jason Kenney explained the provincial government’s plan to build up the province’s labour force would focus on skilled apprenticeships.
“The STEP (Summer Temporary Employment Program) program was just a short-term subsidy for summer jobs, and quite frankly, our youth job-creation wage is going to create a lot more jobs than that did and on a permanent basis as well,” Kenney said at a news conference at Edmonton’s Silent-aire manufacturing facility Monday.
STEP, which provided funding to small businesses and organizations including non-profits and libraries to hire high school or post-secondary students in summer jobs, will be eliminated after the 2019 program year, saving about $32 million over four years.
The province is instead bumping up funding for other student job support programs, including $10 million through Women Building Futures, $2 million for Skills Canada and $11.4 million toward CAREERS: The Next Generation, over the next four years. That will triple the existing amount of annual funding CAREERS receives, with a rising top-up over the next four years that will reach $4.3 million annually, for a total of $6 million by 2022-23.
“Apprenticeship work can lead to fulfilling, fantastic, rewarding lifetime careers, and experiential apprenticeship learning has every bit as much value — in fact, it often has more value than just classroom learning,” Kenney said.
Students too often go to university, end up with debt and struggle to find employment after their programs, he said. Young apprentices get early work experience develop skills they can take into university without debt, he added, praising student apprentices for making “the right choice.”
Alberta Labour predicts some of the most in-demand apprenticeship and skilled trades careers will be mechanics, industrial mechanics, millwrights, construction, and in oil and gas.
The province’s post-secondary education system needs to be aligned with Alberta’s economic needs, and major global employers considering investing in Edmonton need a skilled workforce, Kenney said.
Also in the budget, the government said it would suspend the cap on post-secondary tuition and instead limit tuition increases to seven per cent per year for three years. Interest rates on student loans also would rise.
“I don’t know how I’m going to pay for this, and it’s not fair. Eliminating the STEP program makes it even worse because how are we supposed to pay for these extra costs if it’s harder to get a summer job?” said Fajar Khan, a post-secondary student studying at the University of Alberta, in an opposition NDP news release.
Kenney said that the provincial interest rate changes would be balanced out by federal changes, and that the province needs to address a fiscal crisis. “We know and recognize that Alberta today is facing a very critical dual challenge: one of the highest youth unemployment rates in decades, and the other, of a growing, looming shortage of skilled labour.”
Over the next five years, nearly 20,000 skilled trades workers are expected to retire — a number that will grow to more than 45,000 in 10 years, said minister of Advanced Education Demetrios Nicolaides.
The government says the funding will double the number of schools to 1,000 from 500 that work with CAREERS: the Next Generation, and quadruple the number of students and full-time apprentices from 1,567 to 6,000 by 2023.