There are three ways in which Canada is an outlier in apprenticeships, none of which – so far as I can tell – are based on any principles other than “well that’s the way we’ve always done them”.

The first way in which our apprenticeships are different is that they cover a more restricted set of occupations than other countries.  For us, “apprenticeships” are largely synonymous with construction trades and certain manufacturing fields.  Compare, for instance, our top ten apprenticeable professions with those of Germany.  In Canada, nine out of the top ten apprentice occupations are blue-collar, whereas in Germany it is only four.

Table 1: Top Ten Apprenticeship Registrations by Occupation, 2019

Or, take a gander at developments in the United States, and the wide variety of occupations eligible for apprenticeships.  There are loads of tech apprenticeships up for grabs right now including companies like Google (here’s one program run by the insurance company AON…see if you can find any Canadian insurance companies advertising apprenticeships!)  And the list of new apprenticeable trades includes Information Security Analysts, Digital Forensics Analysts, Statisticians….the list goes on.  Canada, on the other hand, has had essentially no new apprenticeable trades for about 40 years, with the weird, short-lived exception of “call centre operator” (the result of a very weird tax loophole which was eventually closed). 

Could our system cover more occupations?  It could, it simply chooses not to.  Now, one could can put that down to a variety of potential factors (employers in new fields are unaware/uninterested in the possibilities of apprenticeships, unions – who play a significant role in apprenticeship policy – aren’t that interested in extending apprenticeships to new, non-union workplaces, governments are inertia-bound, etc.), but the fact is no province in Canada has exhibited any interest in expanding our model to cover white-collar occupations.

The second way the Canadian apprenticeship model is different is that training is predominantly (but not exclusively) done in blocks usually lasting from 8-12 weeks at a time, at roughly annual intervals.  This is nothing like what is done in the rest of the world, where the predominant model is what is known as day-release: that is, apprentices are in the workplace for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday but are in-class Tuesday and Thursday.  Thus, not only is the ratio of time spent in theoretical and practical courses different (roughly 1:4 in Canada, compared to 2:3 in much of Europe), but the whole pedagogical mix is different.  In the day-release system, teachers have a pretty good sense of what their students are doing on a day-to-day basis and can work with them in areas where they are having trouble: thus, the in-class and practical elements can build upon one another closely.  In the Canadian system, we stuff them with a bunch of theoretical knowledge and hope they remember it for a year.

Why do we do it this way?  Well, I’ve never received a particularly definitive answer, and there isn’t a whole lot of written history on the Canadian apprenticeship system, but I have two hypotheses.  The first is that the block-release system is more convenient for Canadian employers; on occasions where provinces have experimented with day-release systems, employers have complained that they “don’t know where their workers are” on any given day (which reflects a lack of mindfulness on the part of Canadian construction companies more than anything else, but whatever).  The second is that block release was the only way for provinces to rope the federal government into the apprenticeship system.  Under a block release system, apprentices can get Employment Insurance for the 8-12 week study period because it counts as a break in employment; under a day release system, they can’t, and provinces and employers would need to figure out some other way for apprentices to be paid.  In other words, we have consistently built our system around administrative convenience rather than pedagogical outcomes (which is a super-Canadian thing to do).

The third big difference is the length of time it takes to complete an apprenticeship.  Lengths vary somewhat by trade, but in general apprenticeships in Canada are about twice as long as they are in Europe (4 years vs 2 years).  Why?  Beats the absolute living daylights out of me.  Pure job protectionism, I suspect.  And this seriously hampers our ability to expand occupations in skilled trades, mainly because it excludes international students who otherwise would be interested in coming to Canada for this kind of training.  Remember: apprentices aren’t students – their “registration” is with government and requires that they have already been taken on as an employee by a company.  But the company can’t offer entry-level jobs directly to foreigners, and while they can theoretically offer jobs to foreign enrollees of domestic trades programs, the length of these apprenticeships is longer than the length of the post-graduate work permit, so again international students are shut out.  Not smart.

(There is perhaps a fourth difference, which is that our apprenticeship system, unlike those in Europe, is not tied into the secondary system at all.  This is why apprentices in Europe are usually under 21 whereas ours are usually over 25.  But the same is true in America, so I am leaving it out of my “big three”).

My take on this is simple: Canada could do a lot better with apprenticeships.  But we would need to start an overhaul of the system by asking, on an occupation-by-occupation basis: “how can we best improve Canada’s skill base?” rather than working from the idea that everything must fit into pre-conceived notions of apprenticeship (block release, 4-year apprentice periods) that might have been appropriate for the construction industry 40 years ago but isn’t now.  My impression of apprenticeship bureaucracies at the provincial level is that they are mostly pretty conservative so I don’t expect this to happen quickly.  Perhaps skill shortages in the sectors – and they are coming, particularly with respect to the Green Transition – will concentrate minds a bit.