Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, thank you for listening to us today. My name is Mark Hanley. I'm a certified management consultant for Saskatchewan and a member of the Institute of Certified Management Consultants of Canada. As part of my consultancy, I'm also acting for the Saskatchewan Labour Force Development Board as its interim executive director during a period of restructuring, which my firm has led.
I want to do a number of things today. One is to praise the work of your committee. Thank you to the members of the committee for taking on this difficult challenge, because it requires the type of organization and strategic analysis that needs to be done by federal and provincial and other jurisdictions to make this thing work.
I want to table two documents today, and I noted from the previous session, which I caught a moment of, that the co-chair of the Saskatchewan Labour Force Development Board, Larry Hubich, who is the labour co-chair, and the business co-chair, who is a member of the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce, Holly Hetherington, have talked about these issues with you to some degree. So I won't belabour them.
I have two documents. One is the outcome of a very good piece of work that was done for us through the Canadian Labour and Business Centre and an organization called the Workplace Partners Panel that was established in Saskatchewan to deal with challenges and focus on priority topics associated with the challenges to bring more Saskatchewan people into the labour force and to deal with our long-term labour market issues. That's a document I've given to your clerks and it will be available to you.
The second one, which I want to dwell on for a moment longer, is why we think it's important to identify the need for a provincial labour market development organization. I won't go into the notion of skills shortages, because my friend Mr. McKinlay and the lady next to him have done a good job of talking about those things, as have others, I'm sure. But we know these things will continue to present major challenges for Saskatchewan and other jurisdictions in Canada. Indeed, they'll be the major economic issues Saskatchewan will face over the next decade.
So what are we saying in response to this from an industry point of view? We know very well very few provinces, including Saskatchewan, have an active labour market development strategy. And while there are a number of agencies impacting on the labour market, no single agency has responsibility for coordinating labour market development toward agreed-upon targets or benchmarks. So there's a real need, in our case, for a provincial organization to connect the dots with Saskatchewan's labour market. Our Workplace Partners Panel, which was a broad-based panel representing industry--both labour and business--in the province noted it's best achieved through a partnership between labour, business, and government, and that in Saskatchewan there's a need for labour, business, and government to collectively tackle hot issues such as labour market competitiveness and image, productivity, the training system adequacy and capacity, youth engagement--when we say youth engagement it leads me to the next point of aboriginal engagement, because in Saskatchewan, youth equals aboriginal youth in the future--and also to our supply-demand imbalances that Mr. McKinlay referred to earlier.
We've determined that over a period of a year and working in consultation with business, labour, and government, a new model is going to be coming forward to be called the Saskatchewan labour market commission. It's very interesting to note that our discussions on this issue have taken place at very high levels throughout the province. We've spoken not just to the Government of Saskatchewan but also to the opposition parties. There's some strong convergence around the notion that the most critical role a labour market council or coordinating body or commission, if you like to call it that, can play is bringing various labour market partners together to advise elected officials and their bureaucrats in the employment and education sphere on how the province can best address its critical labour market issues.
Those are the things I wanted to leave you with today, and I wanted to leave these papers with you. I'm certainly interested in what you're doing here. We're very interested in the outcomes. I'm prepared to answer any questions you may have.
I should also say that as a volunteer, I am chairman of the Regina and District Food Bank, and we have developed some excellent employment readiness training programs. My message there is that it's very important for governments to recognize that community-based organizations offer a very strong solution to the opportunities to get marginalized workers back into the workforce. I think ample research has been done, particularly work done at the University of Manitoba, that detailed how the community-based sector can connect with marginalized workers, the type of people Ken mentioned in his presentation. As he noted, there are 10,000 or 15,000 heads of families who could be employed over the next five years if they had some skills upgrading and training.
Those are the messages I wanted to deliver today. Thank you very much for hearing us this morning.