Thank you very much, Mr. Minister and officials, for being here today.
I have a brick and a bouquet.
I'll start with the bouquet, and that's the extension of the EI provisions for seasonal workers today. That was a good announcement. I think you'll find the components of that program are essential to persons who are working in seasonal industries, and I hope that eventually that will roll into a permanent aspect of the EI system. So I want to congratulate you on that.
I have another little bouquet. It is for returning my calls this September, when we were in the midst of a bit of a crisis down in Cape Breton. Whether that was based on years of friendship or because of your great sense of duty to doing the Queen's business, whatever the motivation was, I appreciated the call.
The brick is that the issue that I phoned on remains unsolved. That's to do with the allocation of training dollars, really, across Nova Scotia. I'll tell you, if you believe nothing else that I say here today, Minister, between the summer jobs situation and the training dollars in September, this would have been the worst year that a lot of your front-line employees would have had in their public service careers. It has been a tough six months on those employees, because of the change. I know change is always difficult--but because of the change.
Where we sit now is that we have a fund that's supposed to be there for training, and your officials will not tell you that the fund is broken. They'll say there's money in the fund, but we know that the money in the fund can only go to four focus groups: persons with disabilities, first nations, visible minorities, and displaced workers. Those are the groups that can receive funding.
There's no more money for training. For anybody who has registration in January, January intakes, continual intakes, there's no money there. JPCs--no money available for JPCs. We had a great program in Glace Bay, citizens' services, where we trained a number of carpenters and tradespeople over the years, and then they would go into full-time employment. So those dollars are gone.
My question is, are there additional dollars within the system, or additional dollars from the centre, are there moneys that can be reprofiled, so that we don't lose five or six months of training opportunities, or JPCs, community investments, going forward to the fiscal end?