I can give you a hopeful answer to that.
We were involved with helping one of the organizations that delivered the Skills Connect program very successfully. What we found was that all the local, provincial, and federal bodies were very happy to come around the table. Maybe that's because our skills shortage in B.C. and Alberta right now is so serious that they're absolutely desperately looking for the skills. We had no trouble getting them to the table.
In other words, the point is whether it meets their needs. We have to get away from looking at it in an adversarial way--as long as you have minimum standards and the federal government has established a coordinating agency, we should just get on with the job, rather than constantly getting mired in jurisdictional issues, because at the practical level we've found that they've come to the table. For instance, looking at the construction trades, the B.C. Construction Association, the local trades organizations, and each of the trades associations all came around the table, including the colleges delivering everything from ESL to trades upgrading.
