Thank you very much for the question.
I mentioned that there are many players involved in the assessment and recognition of credentials in this country. We have to think about it in terms of the regulated occupations as well as the non-regulated occupations.
In terms of regulated occupations, the over 440 regulatory bodies across the country are key players. There are also five provincial assessment bodies in the country that do credential assessment and recognition on behalf of some regulatory bodies and the individuals themselves. If they'd like to get their credentials assessed against Canadian standards, they can go to one of these five assessment bodies and pay a fee to get an assessment of what the equivalency would be in Canadian terms.
There is a project currently under way at HRSDC to develop a sixth assessment agency for the four Atlantic provinces. That project has been approved by the four Atlantic premiers, and discussions are under way about which province that provincial assessment agency will be situated in.
There are also over 200 post-secondary educational institutions that assess individuals' credentials for the purposes of further study. If you are a student living in France and you would like to come to Quebec to study at the Université du Québec, you need to see what the courses you have taken in France are equivalent to, or what existing diplomas or degrees you will be credited with before you are able to undertake further studies at a Canadian college or university.
There are virtually thousands of players in this field when you add individual employers who are faced every day with individuals' curricula vitae coming across their desks—often in other languages—with their credentials attached. The employer sits there and has to determine and decipher whether that individual has the skills and competencies to do the work the employer is looking for.
So it's not necessarily in terms of credential assessment for the purposes of licensure, as regulatory bodies are performing those tasks in the regulated occupations. Many of the health occupations are regulated. But in the world we work in, we're looking at both regulated and non-regulated occupations. It's important to assist employers as well with tools to assist these provincial assessment agencies that are in many cases dealing with those non-regulated occupations.
There are also more than 53 provincial and territorial ministries. When you think about the issue of credential recognition in this country and look across Canada province by province, including the territories, the issue is led in many jurisdictions by one of four ministries or a combination of ministries. It could be the immigration ministry, and it some provinces it is. It could be the labour market ministry. It could be the education ministry. There's always an interest in the health occupations to be played by the provincial health ministries. In my opening comments I was trying to give the committee a sense of the complexity of the issue by naming the thousands of individual players in the field.