Canada is short of qualified workers. Businesses are closing for lack of staff, air transport and local ferry services are in total disarray, and hospital emergency rooms are closing while medical personnel resign in droves.
It's hardly surprising. What are people trained for today? What do universities teach? Who gets qualified to do real jobs?
A few things we're short of: nurses, lab technicians, doctors, veterinarians, ship pilots, airline pilots, bus drivers, lifeguards, emergency personnel. Even waiters and cashiers.
Take a look at some subjects the universities feel it helpful to offer:
Disability Studies, Gender Studies (e.g. "Power & Difference"), Queer Film, and "Queering the Undead" (that's essential knowledge for a well-prepared work force, eh?)
Also in Cinema is "Decolonizing the Screen", and in History: "Decolonizing Settler Societies", and "Hockey Nation and Canadian Identity". In Philosophy, "Meta-ethics", and the whole spectrum of Social Justice Studies ...
Graduate programs offered at UBC include: "Antiracism Education", "Indigenous Pathways Through Social and Emotional Learning", "Principles of Applied Sports Analytics", "Meaning and Identity in the Digital Age", "Knowledge Translation and Implementation Sciences", and most curious of all: "Climate Studies and Action Capstones ..." Action Capstones, you ask?? It's education-jargon for something once called doing a Thesis ... except without the research. Quelle surprise.)
There's even a shortage of tree-planters. (Unfortunately there seems to be no shortage of loggers. Why don't universities teach Climate Studies and Forest Regeneration, instead of "capstones"?)
No wonder no one can drive a bus or fly a plane. Educators are "translating and implementing" the wrong knowledge.
What work do graduates choose to do? We seem to have a lot of web designers, financial advisors, YouTube makers, podcasters, graphic novelists, singer-songwriters, counsellors, coaches and "influencers". So who gets the actual work done?
So: Flight Is Cancelled. Ferry Cancelled. Emergency Department Closed. Even swimming pool closed.
Lots of teens used to go in for lifeguard training, but now to take the program they have to sign a contract agreeing to "decolonization and equity" in order to learn to swim (as far as I recall, they always were taught to rescue all drowning persons equally).
Many Admissions Departments of schools and post-secondary institutions are now requiring Declarations of Compelled Thought. No wonder a thinking student is loathe to enroll. So now we get an under-trained populace, and a dangerous shrinkage of essential services.
CLOSED
PLEASE POSTPONE YOUR EMERGENCY
TO A LATER DATE
