Second Career of course was somewhat supported through the federal government and the stimulus funding. Yes, it was delivered in Ontario, by Ontario, but it was through that kind of support. So there is a role for the federal government.
I want to caution around the term “re-educate”. One of the things we need to talk about is every learner has a prior set of acquired skills and talents and we have to find ways of measuring that. Our ways of measuring prior learning are probably in need of upgrade. There are things like entrepreneurship skills that someone would have acquired that could be translated with a certain amount of additive learning. Either we walk the talk on lifelong learning or we don't, but I wouldn't want to call it “re-educate”. That's the first thing.
Yes, there's a difference between how you treat high school leavers and how you treat those who have to retool their career.
Let me talk about the high school leavers and some of the issues we're finding. It's all very well when you persuade them and say, “Go join an apprentice program, because you will make good money as a plumber or a gas pipefitter or a Hydro One worker”. But what we're finding also is society has changed. Previously, these professions had families where the father was the auto-shop owner and the kid grew up having worked on car engines, or the father was a carpenter and the kid had built houses on his summers off. Now we find that the big challenge to get that high school student through the first year of post-secondary is to understand how hard it is. Often that high school student has been misadvised and has taken the easier math, but now wants to be an animation designer and fails first-year math. The amount of remedial math work that we're having to do to get kids through technology programs needs to be talked about.
Has this necessarily got to be funded by the federal government directly? No. But when you give the money to the provincial government to deliver post-secondary education, hold them accountable for these outcomes. That's what Jim was saying.