By Andy Blatchford, Canada Press |
Canada’s post-secondary institutions are not producing enough graduates with the right skills to drive future economic growth, warns the head of one of the country’s largest banks.
By Andy Blatchford, Canada Press |
Canada’s post-secondary institutions are not producing enough graduates with the right skills to drive future economic growth, warns the head of one of the country’s largest banks.
CIBC chief executive Victor Dodig told The Canadian Press in an interview Tuesday that much of the country’s eventual economic success will be generated by entrepreneurs who commercialize new ideas and technologies.
And Dodig wasn’t just talking about innovators focused on the high-tech sector. He pointed out that technological breakthroughs also key to the success of traditional industries like manufacturing and natural resources.
But while Dodig credits Canada with boasting a high overall participation rate in post-secondary education when compared to other industrialized countries, he says the system falls short in the disciplines that will really count down the road.
Canada, he added, lags its international peers in training graduates in areas geared for boosting innovation. Those fields include science, engineering and mathematics.
“We have gaps — we’re not producing the types of skills that industries need,” Dodig said Tuesday before raising the topic again in a speech to business leaders and policy-makers at the Canadian Club of Ottawa.
“A lot of people are overeducated and underqualified for the jobs that are needed.”
His comments come at a time when Canada has struggled amid an uncertain global economy and the sting of low commodity prices, particularly in the energy sector. Other industries, meanwhile, have been slow to pick up the slack.
These factors have had consequences for Canada: the economy contracted in the first two quarters of 2015.
In his speech, Dodig noted that over the last decade 10,500 manufacturing plants have shuttered their doors — or 17 per cent of Canada’s capacity.
He said it’s unrealistic to expect old-time sectors like manufacturing to fully regenerate, nor can Canada continue to rely on a low loonie to bail out the economy as a “single variable to drive growth.”
Dodig described Canada’s growth as “anaemic.”
“Yeah, financial services, I think, will be strong, commodity prices will come back — but in the meantime we need to innovate across all of our economic sectors to be successful in the modern-day economy,” he said in his speech.
“We need to be more than hewers of wood and drawers of water.”
Dodig’s remarks also draw more attention to a branch of the economy that has been under the spotlight lately.
Jim Balsillie, a former co-chief executive of Research in Motion, recently warned that Canada has likely missed out on billions of dollars because its innovation economy has shown zero growth for three decades.