That's actually what our foundation does, because the service deliverers are so busy focusing on delivering their services. The reason we founded this foundation was to actually support them in marketing their own programs within the community.
By the way, I want to use this opportunity to say that the fact that you've set up a coordinating agency to look at equivalencies is a great step in the right direction. One of the incredible pitfalls in foreign credential recognition is the fact that there are so many different agencies and such unevenness about the standards of those recognitions, so just that coordination role is a fantastic first step that this government has taken.
Having announced that, we haven't seen where that's gone. On the ground here we don't see the application of it. So yes, there needs to be agencies that can articulate it, because, coming back to your question, the front-line service providers don't have the time to deliver that.
I just want to come back and take the opportunity to also talk about skilled immigrants. I think one of the areas where the federal government could really make a big difference is funding ESL for skilled immigrants. What happens now is that there's much more of generic ESL provided and not ESL for professionals. At their initiative, certain colleges have tried to do that, but they have really struggled for lack of funding. That's a big support that could happen, and the coordination of the foreign credentials.
But I think the number one issue I had hoped to make was that the federal government would actually fund Canadian workplace training. A StatsCan survey has shown that the number one issue is not so much language, as we would have thought, as it is the lack of Canadian workplace practice experience. You get engineers, doctors, architects, and construction workers who have all the skills and a lot of experience, but what they miss is that little link that doesn't give them the Canadian registration because they haven't had Canadian workplace practice. I think my colleague was absolutely right in saying that much of what they need is that lexicon, that currency of practice, the way people talk in a workplace in Canada. You only get that from being in a Canadian workplace.
The B.C. government, which has taken a bit of drubbing on this thing...I'd like to say that the one thing the B.C. government has done that I wish the federal government would do is actually subsidize. It has a program called Skills Connect, which you are probably aware of. I helped to market one organization that has a Skills Connect grant. They've been very successful using that to place. They've had amazing success in placing people within three to six months in a job in their own field.