As I noted back on Monday, for a variety of deeply atavistic reasons, Canadian political parties have decided that the knowledge economy is out and some kind of 1960s economy based, improbably, on the construction industry, is in. And so, similarly, postsecondary students are out along with colleges and universities, while apprentices and skilled trades are in.

Which, you know, whatever. Fine. But if we are going to do this, parties need to start developing policies which will improve our apprenticeship system. At the moment, they are signally failing at that because no one understands what an apprenticeship is. Let’s get into the details here.

The most important question seems to be: how do we get more people into apprenticeships? Well, everyone would do well to remember that becoming an apprentice isn’t like enrolling in a program at a community college: to enter an apprenticeship, you need to find someone willing to hire you. The basic limit on total apprentice numbers is the number of apprentices that companies are willing to hire. This in turn is conditioned by two things: the profitability of firms hiring apprentices, and the rules surrounding apprentice supervision; specifically, the ratio of “journeypersons,” that is, people in the skilled trades who have both finished their apprenticeship and obtained a Certificate of Qualification—a relatively simple-to-pass test which allows you to oversee/mentor juniors—to apprentices. Let’s deal with these two in turn.

Firms must be profitable to hire apprentices. This is why apprenticeship numbers are, unlike college enrolments, pro-cyclical. When the economy stalls, the number of apprentices drops. This is why all the Liberal and conservative promises about apprentices in the last election were such nonsense: you can give all the money you want to apprentices (as the Liberals plan to do) or training facilities (as the Conservatives did) but it won’t make a damn bit of difference if companies aren’t hiring. The normal way to solve this problem is through wage subsidies to employers, which can be raised during bad economic times and so give them an incentive not to lay anybody off (the Netherlands, in particular, has such a system). If anyone were serious about keeping apprenticeship numbers in the coming recession, this would be the key policy tool they should choose.

The other issue here has to do with the supervision ratio. In most trades and most provinces, no journeyperson is allowed to supervise more than one apprentice. That puts a functional limit on how many apprentices businesses can support. Moving that ratio from 1:1 to 1:2 (i.e. each supervisor can oversee two apprentices), as British Columbia has done, would have a big effect on apprentice numbers. Trade Unions, predictably, tend not to be keen on this idea.

Another way to increase the number of journeypersons, of course, would be to shorten the length of apprenticeships. Canada has the longest-duration apprenticeship system in the world, bar none. Nobody else thinks four years is a sensible duration; in fact, most tend to end the apprenticeship after two. I have never heard a decent explanation as to why this is the case, other than the fact that businesses gain by not having to pay full journeyperson wage rates for an extra two years. A political party that really wanted to speed up the production of journeypersons and put more money in the hands of workers would figure out how to bring the duration of Canadian apprenticeships down to the world average.

Does providing money in the form of a grant to apprentices matter? Not according to this recent research from the federal government. It doesn’t even really change who goes into an apprenticeship, since most apprentices don’t find out about the grant until after they have signed up. Plus, remember this key difference between grants to apprentices and grants to students. For students, grants are a substitute for wage income. Apprentices, by definition, are working, often for quite substantial rates of pay. Most (but not all) provinces have wage rate schedules by trade and year of apprenticeship (British Columbia’s is here), and at a very high degree of approximation, they make about minimum wage + 25% in their first year and minimum +100% in their final year. Assuming they are working 40 weeks per year. That means most of them are making in the $30K/year range while being an apprentice— an extra couple of grand is nice but doesn’t necessarily move the needle on behaviour the way it does for a student whose work income is below $10K. 

This is also why apprenticeship completion grants are a complete waste of money. The lifetime value of becoming a journeyperson is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars; the idea that handing out an extra $2K to apprentices upon completion of a program meaningfully changes anyone’s calculus about completion is farcical.

Where more money can really help is with respect to capital. The quality of skilled trades training is about having access to up-to-date facilities and equipment: a skills agenda, properly speaking, is an infrastructure agenda. You might think that the Conservative plans to spend $850 million on training infrastructure were a good thing. Well, no. The plan was actually to spend $850 million specifically on union-controlled training sites. Nothing to the public colleges that provide something north of 75% of all trades training in this country. This was based on an Ontario scheme which spent hundreds of millions doing the same. The money built some really good facilities, but would have done so if it had been directed to colleges as well. What it accomplished was gaining the Tories a whack of private-sector union endorsements. Which is, let’s face it, a gross and unacceptable use of funds allegedly put aside for education. Put money into training facilities, sure, but if it’s the apprentices and not their unions you care about, you let all different training providers compete fairly for the money. 

That’s it, really. If you’re a political party looking for a set of policies that will genuinely improve and increase apprenticeship training, then: i) introduce a wage subsidy system that protects apprentices during downturns, ii) reduce the duration of apprenticeships, and iii) spend lots of money on training infrastructure across all training providers. Your bases are covered, and you would be doing some actual good for apprentices and the skilled trades rather than—as in this past election—simply engaging in some form of expensive, ineffective kabuki to show blue-collar workers how much you want their love.