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?