I'm sort of agnostic as to who is doing the learning. We all need to be learning. The part that I'm passionate about is that we need applied learning. Polytechnics deliver that. When you think of the word “apprenticeship”, which is work-based learning, it has so much more promise. It is funded at one-fifth of what we support a post-secondary student with. In Canada, with our terrible jurisdictional challenges that we've had for 150 years, apprenticeship is delivered in disparate ways by trade across the provinces. It is an old system.
What we're proposing is to consolidate a lot of the learnings, as well as the best practices, and bring employers closer to apprentices through a centre of excellence that is focused on apprenticeship and vocational training. We have a brief, which I would happily submit. The idea is one from the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum. It's their idea, but we are a patron member of that institution, and we think the federal government can scale up, consolidate, and show across jurisdictions improvement in the delivery of skills training.