Evidence of meeting #9 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 39th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was terms.
Liberal
Geoff Regan Liberal Halifax West, NS
It's certainly an important issue, but we could have motions at every meeting about more things to study. We seem to be doing a bit of that. The study before us is unfortunately extremely broad and a bit vague in its definition, but it's also taking up the schedule for the rest of this year.
We ought to try to get through it and then, as we get closer to the end of it, figure out what we will do next, rather than have a whole series of things we've agreed to study with no real intention of getting to them, or no real likelihood of getting to them any time soon.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
I think that is something we agreed to as a committee.
Mr. Martin, do you have any more comments on this?
NDP
Tony Martin NDP Sault Ste. Marie, ON
This isn't a new subject that I'm bringing forward. I talked about this in the last Parliament for almost a year. I'm back again to this Parliament to see if we can't study this.
As a government, we transfer $100 billion a year to the provinces, and we don't know anymore whether it's relevant or not, whether it's being spent in the right places, or whether there's any way of measuring its effectiveness. As I said, there's a lot of critique out there about it. So I think it's something that is certainly in our area of responsibility.
I have been very cooperative up to this point in saying there are some other things we need to take a look at, and I was going to be patient in getting to this. I sent a notice to everybody last week about this. To be frank, I didn't think the employability study was going to be that large. I didn't think we were going to go that far into the fall. But somebody made the decision to do that and set up a schedule. I know we had some input into it, but we didn't talk as a subcommittee about that at all, and I'm concerned about that.
But this is something that I think is core and central to our committee in how we spend those moneys. Are we getting value for our dollar? Are we supporting our people as life evolves?
Mr. Lessard made a good point, and maybe it's something we'll discover as well. On the expectation and understanding from Quebec, what do we need to do?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Thank you, Mr. Martin. I appreciate that.
It was the committee that decided we'd undertake this employability study, so once again we're at the will of the committee. If there's no more further discussion, I'll propose the vote.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
This is on the Canada social transfer.
You would like a recorded vote.
The motion is that the committee conducts a study of the Canada social transfer from a social policy perspective including in its study--
Conservative
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Once again, this is the motion we have before us.
(Motion negatived [See Minutes of Proceedings])
