The thing is, we can't get to the bottom of the skills shortage and skills mismatch if we don't have the data. The point of principle here is that the federal government, in its shared jurisdiction with the provinces, runs a series of surveys administered by Statistics Canada. Many of those surveys have been left inactive and should be revitalized, because what we need to do is to connect education, employers, and governments for knowing and tracking outcomes.
We have recommended two surveys that are not our own but Statistics Canada's, the youth in transition survey and the workplace and employees survey, to do just that. But who benefits? High school students would now get reliable information on employment outcomes five years out. Educational institutions would know about Pathways. Employers will get granular local data, which they're all calling for no matter whether they're the Chamber of Commerce, John Manley's council of CEOs, or industry sector organizations.
And at the end of the day, a publicly funded education system would be held to account if we knew what was happening to publicly funded learners across the system. That's why the time is now to solve the skills discussion with evidence. This is LMI.