Thank you, Chair.
Through you, I would just say that we all want good legislation. We all want what's best for our kids when they head off to day care and have the best possible start. That is why the agreements that we put in place with every province and territory in this country have very specific frameworks in terms of workforce, in terms of reporting to the secretariat, and so on and so forth.
Through you, Chair, naming the Minister of Labour would actually be in conflict with clause 4 in terms of the designation of minister that's in this legislation. I would remind colleagues that at the federal level, the labour minister can only act jurisdictionally on federally regulated workforces. The ECE workforce is a provincial workforce, and appropriately so, through the agreements. Education is also jurisdictionally under provincial purview as part of our Constitution, and the ECE workforce, I would remind colleagues, is part of the provincially regulated system.
That being said, I support our continuing to work with provinces and territories to ensure that there is a strong and capable workforce, respected but also high quality, and to ensure that those mechanisms through the agreements are in place. Frankly, the Minister of Labour simply doesn't have jurisdictional power here. It would be really beyond the scope of the Minister of Labour to engage in such activity with a non federally regulated workforce, because it's really not within their responsibilities.