Evidence of meeting #29 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 41st Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was métis.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
From your experience and comments, what I drew is that fact there are still silos. Say you have that single mom who just gets out of a bad relationship and she's got two kids. She's receiving support from provincial community services with dental and medical support and some living allowance and what have you, and she takes a training program and there are supports there. Sometimes the cases that come to our office are the ones who are not willing to make that next step. The supports aren't there or the communication between the federal and the provincial levels of government aren't there. If she takes an entry-level job then she may have to surrender those medical benefits and supports. She exposes her kids by not having those types of support.
Can you comment on the ability of the provinces and the federal officials, through the LMDAs, to work together to provide her with that opportunity just past the training, that first and maybe even second job opportunity.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Phil McColeman
Ms. Wood, you'll have to hold that response and comment, because Mr. Cuzner was quite lengthy with his preamble and he's well over his time already of five minutes.
Conservative
Conservative
Colin Mayes Conservative Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here today. Your testimony was very interesting and I think very valuable to the study that we're doing now.
Matthew Mendelsohn, director of the Mowat Centre, was a past witness who appeared before the committee. There was a report on the Mowat EI task force final report, and what it recommended was:
...federal funding streams (LMDAs, LMAs, Labour Market Agreements for Persons with Disabilities, and the Targeted Initiative for Older Workers) be collapsed into a single transfer, funded from general revenues, and modelled on the LMAs. EI qualification should be eliminated as a precondition for accessing active employment measures.
I thought that was a very interesting comment in that report, and I just would like to get your comments and thoughts on that. One of the challenges—Madam Wood, I appreciated what you were saying—is trying to coordinate all of these things and to ensure.... I think our government has proven that we want to allow provinces and communities to set their priorities rather than the federal government doing so, but there is some accountability and there need to be some outcomes.
The reason that we introduced the Canada job grant was the fact that some of the provinces were not having good outcomes. I might say that Quebec has done very well in outcomes, but there were some challenges where there were some labour skill shortages in some of the regions in this country, so they needed to be addressed. We heard that.
I've been on this committee for a number of years and we heard that in our study of various regions, various sectors of the economy. They said they had some real skill shortages. We needed to respond to that need and come up with some idea by working with the employer, the provinces, and with the federal government.
Could you maybe just comment on some of the remarks I've just made? Thank you.
Madam Wood, do you want to start, please?
Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Victoria, As an Individual
Yes, thank you very much.
I think what we've done with the LMDAs and the LMAs is that we have sorted out, quite significantly, federal-provincial roles and responsibilities, meaning that the provinces have that design and delivery responsibility. I think we need to take that to the next step, to just improve the coherence—one more step—in two ways.
Number one is to not have the four separate agreements that you just described. I think I do agree that these agreements should somehow or other be collapsed into one agreement that has overall objectives and goals, without their individual accountability arrangements, because otherwise the provinces would be operating in silos as they try to manage these four separate agreements. So that's the first bit of coherence. I think they could and should be collapsed into one funding agreement.
The other coherence element that I would bring into that is, I would also ask and suggest that the residual federal programming for youth and persons with disabilities be part of that coherent transfer. That would bring another piece of coherence to it.
Conservative
Colin Mayes Conservative Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Can I cut you off just to hear a comment from Madam Kenny, please.
President, Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne du Canada
I'm not specialized in labour market....
I am here to tell you about language obligations. Whether there is one agreement because everything has been streamlined or whether there are ten, the important thing for us is the language clauses.
Associate Professor and Interim Assistant Dean, College of Business and Economics, University of Guelph, As an Individual
I think employers complain a lot about skill shortages. I think the government listens maybe a bit too much. The evidence is that any skill shortages are localized to certain occupations, certain industries, including, of course, the petroleum sector in Alberta. But the labour market should sort this out. It takes a bit of a time. IT has a great shortage right now.
I understand that the government's response would be to increase the funding for the skills development program, which I like. But, on the other hand, at some point you say, “Why don't employers go and train the workers that they need? Why should the government intervene?” I'm not convinced that we have enough evidence to say that there is market failure, that the government is responsible to train employers to resolve skill shortages.
I think employers are a bit too risk averse and should train more themselves. Having said that, sure, more training would be beneficial. The problem is that you don't have a crystal ball to know what occupation and industry will be in demand five years from now, or even two years from now, so it's a bit tricky.
If you want me to elaborate more, I will. I just don't know how much time we have.
Associate Professor and Interim Assistant Dean, College of Business and Economics, University of Guelph, As an Individual
I have lots of stories about the skill shortage.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Phil McColeman
That's the end of that round.
Now I should mention to the witnesses, and I did mean to say this during Mr. Cuzner's questioning, that for the working of the committee I have to keep fair tight rein on the time. So any of the answers that you're not able to give today, you should be fully aware you can submit to the committee after this meeting. You can also send in any other submissions that you wish to as we continue this study. Feel free to do that, or if you can work it into your answers here today, please do so.
Now we move on to Madam Sims, for five minutes.
NDP
Jinny Sims NDP Newton—North Delta, BC
Thank you very much.
I think it's very clear—and not much of this is being denied by anybody—that the data we're using to inform some of our decisions around training, immigration, or any of the other issues, really seems to be not present. I was interested that today in the media we're reading stories of how a new skill stream is going to be expedited for Canada in the immigration process, through the LMO, using that as data. I keep thinking that we've had hundreds and thousands of violations of those LMOs. I am not sure why so many were given out while people are being laid off work. Canadians are being laid off work while at the same time when we get to LMDAs....
Let me just reiterate, having well over 350,000 temporary foreign workers, and many of them in jobs that Canadians could be doing and are willing to do, that's what they have come out and said, not just to us but to government, that it is a major concern that we are lacking data.
I've heard a different perspective from Ms. Wood today as to how she thinks that data really needs to be compiled if we want it to really serve us well, and the need for the provinces and the territories to work together, as well as the federal government. But the bit that I want to focus on today is the access to and administration of the LMDAs. I don't think any of us around this table are unaware of some pitfalls. We are hearing from some of the provinces on this. When the Canada job grant was announced, especially, there was this kind of guttural response, visceral I would say, asking what are you doing? We've just got our infrastructure working and now we feel under attack again.
We do need a revised framework. One of the things we keep hearing is that fewer than half of unemployed Canadians have access to EI funds and, therefore, LMDA money. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on that. I'd like to start with Ms. Wood, and then I have other questions.
Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Victoria, As an Individual
I think that we have these four segmented agreements to the following effect: this pot of money is for people who are EI-eligible, and there are fewer people EI-eligible; this pot of money is for non-EI; this pot of money is for disabled persons; and this pot of money is for older workers. These are unemployed and marginally employed folks who need access to a wide variety of programs. What the provinces are doing when somebody comes in the door is that they're trying to provide those services in a seamless way, and then behind the scenes are trying to figure out how they use these various pots of money, as well as provincial money, in order to be able to provide the services to the people coming in the door.
I do think that a more streamlined federal-provincial funding mechanism would be useful. That's got to do with what the services are for the people coming in the door. I think we also need to have a more robust research stream, and particularly a comparative research stream. That would be a very significant role for the federal government, but which is not in place at the moment.
The provinces are generally fairly highly resistant to being compared with one another, which is why I think the labour market programming needs to be done in a collaborative fashion between the federal and provincial governments. They can agree to some overall goals, for which they would then be willing to provide information and data. They could be compared and judged one from the other by using a system like benchmarking. That requires administrative data, not the kind of data that you would collect from Statistics Canada. That's why I think we need a more robust research mechanism, particularly one that is federally led. The provinces themselves would then be responsible for the array of programs within a more streamlined funding mechanism.
NDP
Jinny Sims NDP Newton—North Delta, BC
Thank you very much.
My next question is, do you think that only people who are on this very restricted EI right now should get access to training, or should training be opened up to people who are not on EI as well?
Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Victoria, As an Individual
I absolutely do believe training should be opened up, yes. That's what the LMDAs were providing. That was a wonderful opportunity when the LMDAs came on board because the provinces did not have the funding to be able to do that kind of training. Certainly, that was the difficulty when the Canada job grant was offered, is that provinces had now had the ability to offer training to non-EI clients, and these are the people coming in the front door. So they were very concerned about the Canada job grant because it was taking away the funding they were making available for training.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Phil McColeman
That's the end of that round.
Mr. Butt, you're our last questioner. Go ahead, for five minutes.
Conservative
Brad Butt Conservative Mississauga—Streetsville, ON
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all the witnesses for joining us today.
My questions will be for Professor Wood and Professor Plesca.
Do you have any examples of best practices that you can share with the committee? Are there provinces, are there sectors, are there areas that are doing a much better job of training and retraining, and having higher success rates in actually finding people employment opportunities across the country? Are there provinces that we can learn from, that other provinces should be emulating?
Professor Plesca, do you want to start?
Associate Professor and Interim Assistant Dean, College of Business and Economics, University of Guelph, As an Individual
All right, sir, I will.
I think evidence shows that very expensive programs also have very large benefits, so if the training is very intense, very targeted, and you pay a lot of money for the best training providers, the results are equally high. The evidence I know of is from the U.S. I don't know of any best practice evidence from Canada.
I would say one more thing, though, and it's about the Canada job grant, in some sense. The federal government, I think their idea was the literature shows that employers know better how to train and get better results from training, maybe because they select workers who would have a better impact from training. But I think there is some evidence emerging, and we should pay attention to it, that if we properly measure government training, the one that LMDAs do, their impacts are pretty high as well. I think the literature has mismeasured the impacts of training mostly because of the occupations that are associated.
I'm with the provinces on this. It's not necessarily that the employers always know better. The governments do a decent job, on average. Again, I don't know best practices, but on average, the governments don't do as poorly as the literature had seemed to indicate in the past. It's not the fault of the government. It's just that the federal government is coming up with this idea. The literature seemed to think employer training is better, but maybe not. Maybe government training is as efficient.
Conservative
Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Victoria, As an Individual
I'll make my comments in terms of best practices between provinces in outcomes of the programming, and then best practices in governance.
In terms of best practices between provinces in outcomes of the programming, we don't know. The reports we have do not allow us to compare provinces’ best practices—whether Alberta's results are better than Manitoba's results, for example—because we do not do a good job of comparative research within the Canadian context. This is part of what I would see a Canadian CIHI equivalent doing in the labour market area, allowing us thereby to compare results from one province to another. But it would have to be done as a collaborative process, where provinces agreed to what they were trying to do so they could be compared with each other. It could not be federally imposed.
That's on the one side—comparing results. This is why we need this kind of research.
On the governance element, that is the comparative research that I am doing. When I'm looking at governance, I'm comparing provinces on such practices as do they have single windows and do single windows produce better results? That's one example. For example, Quebec and Alberta have a single window, where their citizens walk into the same door and get access to an array of services.
Another element that I'm doing some comparative work on is comparing to what degree they are contracting their services. For example, is B.C. going to be getting a better result because most of their employment services are contracted through third-party delivery agents versus civil servants providing those services? B.C. is the one doing most of that, whereas other provinces are holding some of the services in-house.
Another element is that different provinces have different approaches to partnerships. Quebec, of course, is the leader on that one, in how their labour market partners' council works.
Therefore, when I talk about governance, that is what my research is on. I'm trying to compare provinces on the governance element. I'm about 60% of the way through and have described to you some of the themes I'm going to use. But the bottom line is that I think it's imperative to compare our provinces. Provinces are highly resistant to being compared, but if we want good labour market results, they need to be willing to be compared, we need to have a framework so they can be compared, and we need to do the research and analysis to generate information so we can improve how we do labour market programming.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Phil McColeman
Thank you very much. That wraps up our first hour.
On behalf of the committee, I want to thank all of the people who have been witnesses here today and part of our panel. Certainly, it has been very worthwhile in hearing some of the very practical thinking that has gone into your testimony this morning. We thank you for that.
We'll recess while we set up for the second panel.