Special Meeting at CNC Friday
Tuesday, March 6, 2012 @ 3:58 AM
Prince George, B.C.- Several post secondary institutions have been called to a special meeting at the College of New Caledonia this Friday to talk about a plan for a new Trades Training Centre.
The idea comes from Canfor and the BID group of companies, which calls for the former Rustad Sawmill to be turned into a trades training centre. The hope is to train northern students for the pending boom that will call for a variety of trades people. Canfor President and CEO Don Kayne, admits the goal to have the doors open September 2013, is ambitious “We need to be ambitious because there is an immediate need. With the growth plans that we have, and others across the Province, it’s essential we get on with this as quickly as we possibly can, so we need to be ambitious.” Kayne predicts the project will cost about $20 million dollars with Canfor’s contribution of the building site being worth about half of that total. TGhe balance willhave to come from outside sources, including government.
It’s is estimated that there will be a labour shortage to fill the demand for workers as multiple projects come on line, from the Mount Milligan mine to the Site C dam construction and highway 37 transmission line, there is also the construction of three LNG plants and the pending boom in the natural gas industry in the north east.
Friday’s meeting won’t be the first between CNC, BCIT and the project proponents, but new players invited to the table are North West College, Thompson Rivers University, and Northern Lights College.
Again, the pitch will be that if students are trained in the north, they will stay in the north.
Even if the classes get underway in September 2013, it would be 4 years before many of the trades apprenticeships would be completed. Kayne says that is still within a workable timeframe “Certainly we need to get started, so the real critical thing here is, if we don’t get started today we will definitely have an issue here when you get out four and five years. Our company we plan for three five, seven years ahead now, so clearly as we all know going foraward one of the biggest issues we all have collectively is just a lack of skills training.”
Kayne doesn’t expect there will be any turf wars between the various institutions. “ Everyone agrees there’s issues with the amount of skills training, so we think we’ve been successful I the past in some of the things we’ve done before in the market to get everyone to understand that collectively we will have a lot more influence a lot more opportunity to make this successful and to make B.C. more competitive if we get everyone working on the same page here.”
Comments
Before they spend all this money on a bunch of new trade courses they should start delivering on the courses they offer now………it’s almost a 2 year wait to get into the heavy duty mechanics course at CNC. then you have to wait almost 2 years again to get in for your next year. If there is already such a shortage of trades people they should have more courses. They are only 6 weeks long so it shouldn’t take much.
This is also a failure of the education system in the mid to late 1990’s pushing for degree and university programs while at the same time stripping industrial education programs.
What a waste of money. Canfor is donating a environmental disaster that they don’t want to clean up (can they even donate leased land?).
All that is needed is to use the facilities we have now. In order to use the facilities we have now we have to have more students. Companies have to start indenturing apprentices. Apprentices need funding by the ITA so that the college can put on the course. No students, no funding, no course.
It’s all about the colleges needing more money to put on the classes. The classrooms are already there.
Any money coming from government should be put into using the facilites we have. Send people to school Canfor and instead of donating land, pay the full cost of the people you want trained. But first you need to commit to indenturing apprentices.
I sound like a broken record!
Many companies do not “donate” nowadays unless they benefit…… I do not agree with opening up another trade centre when we have not utilized what we have.
Companies need to use the money for more apprenticeships to get the existing students jobs. I personally am tired of so many company write-offs and the tax payers getting the brunt.
So is the land going to be environmentally tested first? I am sure many in this town know what the ground etc is like…
Besides, they have a hard enough time now getting qualified instructors/teachers. My son was taught in a trade program at CNC recently and the intructors did not have any form of teachers Certification….
Guesswhat the instructors are just that instructors. The best instructor to teach trades is one that has worked in that trade for X amount of years. So those instructors at CNC have Interprovincial Certification that is world renowned.
I don’t understand how this can happen when the College already has a budget shortfall of over a million dollars. So any new money that government comes up with for education should go to the current institutions. Building a new one or should I say renovating an old sawmill sounds like an expensive idea.
Canfor will not have to clean up the site as it would cut into Jimmy’s share dividends!
As I said before, students will get “real industrial world” experience at Rustad.
As with any other site that has been used for decades and is situated in an industrial area with air emissions from plants close to each other and large expanses of unpaved areas as well as paved areas with large expanses of deposits from trucks that do not get cleaned more than once a year, the students will get plenty of good pollutants coming at them.
I mean, if Rustad’s had not closed, and the grounds were “contaminated”, they would not have stopped manufacturing for a few years while removing the contaminants, would they have? So why should the contaminants be removed just because the people on site are students, apprentices, or journeymen?
“My son was taught in a trade program at CNC recently and the intructors did not have any form of teachers Certification.”
This could be more a good thing than a bad thing, as NoWay suggested….
The “instructors” teach applied skills more than theoretical knowledge. It is important that they are “experts” at doing what they teach. They need to pass on practical skills and knowledge to adult learners.
Many instructors do have a Provincial Instructor Diploma Program Certificate as presented by Vancouver Community College.
I know HS teachers who try to instruct practical skills in shops, gym, business, even the sciences and literature who have never professionally built anything from various materials, played professional sports, worked in business offices, worked in science labs or designed mechanical systems relying on the principles of physics or written poetry, novels, etc that were commercially published.
Children get very little sense of the real world application of what they are taught in primary and secondary school.
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