Mr. Speaker, the member raises excellent points. Of course, I do not agree that we are starting an argument. To the contrary, I co-convened the first meeting of the Forum of Labour Market Ministers in five years, which I think is ridiculous, last November in Toronto. We are having our next one in July. We want to have a regular, at least semi-annual, series of meetings to get collaboration between the federal and provincial governments.
The provincial ministers would tell the member that I worked very closely with the ministers and showed enormous flexibility so that they could sign up to the Canada job grant and the renewed labour market agreements, the Canada job fund, giving them the flexibility they need and getting our objective of greater employer investment in skills development. That would ensure that the training dollars actually go to creating real jobs and not to training for the sake of training.
If the hon. member talks to my provincial counterparts, he would find that I have really tried to be collaborative. We need to, albeit we are going in the same direction together, which is why I invited the provinces to study the European system with me. I totally agree with him that we need to do much better by knocking down the remaining provincial exceptions under chapter 7 of the Agreement on Internal Trade.
There is no reason why, in this federation of 13 jurisdictions, it should be more difficult for tradesmen or professionals to move from one jurisdiction to another than for someone to move within the 27 member states of the European Union. That is ridiculous. It should end. We need to eliminate those exemptions, and that is one of the reasons, by the way, we are practically supporting programs for the harmonization of apprenticeship systems to encourage mobility.