I'm your second Mr. Mendelson for the day, and I'm no relation, by the way.
Thank you very much for the opportunity today to comment on the renewal of the labour market development agreements. Most of the presentations you've heard have focused on the rules and the funding of the LMDAs. For example, several witnesses have advocated the requirement for a uniform 360 hours of work to determine eligibility for employment benefits and supports, and we agree that this is especially necessary in view of the declining eligibility for regular employment insurance benefits for many workers in Canada.
Generally we also endorse these recommendations, but I want to take a different tack this morning and address the future of the LMDAs from another angle, one that you possibly haven't heard as much about. I want to ask what the federal government's role in employment training and supports should be.
I'm old enough—I have not just grey hair but almost no hair—not only to remember the Meech Lake accord but actually to have played a very minor role in the negotiations. The failure of the Meech Lake accord led to, as a few of you may recall, a much sharper discussion of the division of powers between the orders of government. One of the key areas of responsibility under consideration was labour market training.
In initiating a second attempt at constitutional reconciliation after the failure of the first Meech Lake accord, Prime Minister Mulroney's government released an important paper called “Shaping Canada's Future Together”. In that paper, Ottawa proposed a “constitutional amendment to recognize explicitly that labour market training is an area of exclusive provincial jurisdiction”.
This proposal eventually became a consensus among all of the participants and was incorporated as a draft constitutional amendment in the Charlottetown accord in 1992. We all know, of course, that the Charlottetown accord failed to pass. Nevertheless the consensus supporting provincial responsibility for labour market training remained intact. A process of transferring federal labour market training funds, staff, and programs to the provinces was initiated under Prime Minister Chrétien in 1995. That was the origin of the first LMDAs. The consensus not only endured but was reinvigorated with the election of Prime Minister Harper's government. The late finance minister Flaherty in his 2007 budget recognized “the primary role and responsibility that provinces and territories have in the design and delivery of training programs”. Under Mr. Flaherty's direction, the process of devolution was continued and completed with the signing of an agreement with Ontario in, I think, 2007.
The argument for provincial primacy with respect to labour market training is not just about jurisdiction for jurisdiction's sake. It makes overwhelming sense from a practical, programmatic perspective to centre labour market training in the provinces. The strength of federalism is that it can respond flexibly to different conditions in different parts of Canada. We have everything from virtually full employment in Alberta and Saskatchewan to chronic double digit unemployment in much of the Atlantic provinces. We have a booming natural resource sector in some provinces and a struggling manufacturing sector in others. Moreover, the provinces and territories have responsibility, as we all know, for education, including not only K to 12, which is critical, but also colleges, universities, and all other streams of training.
If we want—and I'm again quoting the late Minister Flaherty—“one-stop, seamless labour market programming”, labour market training has to be consolidated under provincial responsibility. In our view the provinces have been reasonably successful in improving training programs, although as I will note in a minute, we do need much better evaluation. When I say they have been “reasonably successful”, I don't mean that we have reached nirvana and that every program works perfectly and we can't make further improvements. Of course we can.
Our recommendation, though, would be not to fiddle with the process of devolution. I would argue, don't do what has been done recently with the labour market agreements. Let the provinces continue to do what they do best so Ottawa can get on with its own job.
What is Ottawa's job in the area of labour market training? We see three critical roles. One of them has just been mentioned.
First, Canada needs vastly better labour market information and we need that labour market information not only at the wholesale level, by which I mean statistical data that governments and analysts can look at, but at the retail level as well. That is workers in rural New Brunswick, for example, need to have a way of knowing which jobs are available in northern British Columbia.
Today we have the worst of all worlds. We have unreliable and out-of-date labour market information for employers, analysts, researchers, and governments, and we have no national labour market exchange.
Firm-level surveys are one approach, and we have seen in the newspaper recently a discussion of a firm-level survey that took place, the results of which haven't been analyzed. But firm-level surveying is old-fashioned and it's expensive and it's always out of date.
I'd say let's get creative, let's move Canada into the 21st century. We need real-time information on labour demand and that can be achieved through the creation and use of administrative data. One small relatively inexpensive beginning—