WEDNESDAY, MARCH 10, 2004

Setting the standards and certifying journey-level tradesmen is responsibility of the provincial government. The recent firing of the senior level apprenticeship manager for involvement in “fudging” examinations and the new watered down training requirements have the rest of the country questioning the credibility of BC trades certificates.

Last year the government announced sweeping changes to apprenticeship training. ‘Modular’ or partial trades training was supposed to address the coming skills shortage by making training easier and making the system more ‘flexible’ for employers. The old system, known as ‘full scope’ trades training became optional.

Advanced Education Minister, Hon. Shirley Bond, has argued that that too many apprentices dropped out under the old system. By issuing certificates to partial or ‘modular’ trained workers the government expects less apprentices to drop out. The new policy of ‘modular’ certificates was also in response to pressure from some construction contractors who claimed that ‘full scope’ training was too costly.

While attrition rates under the ‘full scope’ model are high the Minister has side-stepped the real issue. Drop-out rates are high because some employers use apprentices as a source of cheap labour. Unscrupulous employers use apprentices for one or two years and then lay them off. Many apprentices don’t drop out because they want to, it’s because their employer abandons them.

Since the new semi-skilled training system was adopted last year Minister Bond trumpets the success of adding 3,000 new apprentices to the system, for a total 19,000 apprentices in the province. If the Minister is correct attrition has dropped from 38% to 2%. It’s amazing!! The government has done this while laying off over 100 staff and closing 16 regional apprenticeship offices across the province. Today there are just 12 workers left in Burnaby to service all of the apprentices and their employers in the province. How is this miracle possible?

Unfortunately this miracle is false. The statistics used by the Minister are bogus. Without any staff there is no one left to update the databases and remove the apprentices who have dropped out from the system. Building Trades Apprenticeship Administrators estimate that more than 3,000 of the registered apprentices have, in fact, abandoned their training.

The Minister has also promoted the success of the new semi-skilled training system by announcing new spaces at colleges and technical institutions. Here again the Minister is on the wrong track. Over 80% of an apprenticeship takes place “on-the-job,” not in the classroom. Colleges and Technical Institutes don’t sponsor apprentices. Employers and unions sponsor apprentices through Joint Training Boards. The best way to boost completion rates is to bring stability to the construction industry. What good are more technical training spaces when employers are forced to cut corners and lay-off their apprentices in a ruthless unregulated construction industry? Now that the government has turned the entire system into a “self-help” model, apprentices are no longer required to show up to fill the classroom spaces. The new spaces the Minister talks about are empty. After they’ve been laid off, apprentices don’t show up for their classroom technical training.

The new approach to trades training isn’t new at all. In fact a similar short cut to trades training was tried in the early 1980’s. Back then the ‘modular’ approach was known as TRAC. The fast TRAC of the early 80’s ended after four years and trades training was returned to the “full scope” model. TRAC was a colossal failure. Hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted, thousands of apprentices were short changed, and skills development in the province was set back by years. Haste is waste with apprenticeship training.

The official who was fired last month was under a lot of pressure from the Ministry to boost apprenticeship training in the province. Faced with high failure rates on the Interprovincial examinations (Red Seal examinations) the Manager of the Burnaby Training Centre is alleged to have altered the exam or the results so that a higher proportion of apprentices passed the exam. While the Manager has been fired and senior Director of Apprenticeship Training is on leave, are they the only ones to blame for a system gone wrong?

The Building and Construction Trades Council have asked the Minster to conduct a complete public investigation of the exam-gate scandal at the Apprenticeship Training Centre. Every other province is watching us. We can’t afford to be seen to condone standards that are less than the national ‘Red Seal’ standard. The longer it takes to face up to the folly of semi-skilled training the worse will be BC’s reputation for training. Shutting out our workers from employment opportunities in the rest of the country does nothing to advance the BC economy.

For further information contact Wayne Peppard at (604) 916-0027 (cellular).

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For further information contact 

the BCYT-BCTC office:  604-291-9020

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