Thank you, Chair.
As we note in the report, the agreements don't require the provinces to get any kind of agreement or approval beforehand. They can pick their own categories. They simply inform the department.
There is work being done to try to do an overall evaluation, which is probably really critical as to how this system is working. In the agreements there is a requirement for them to provide information to the federal government on the retention of nominees within their jurisdiction, but we note in the report that the information is either absent or incomplete, so the federal government doesn't have a good idea of what is actually happening in the provinces.
As a minimum, we would expect that there would be some exchange, but at the end of the day it's the federal government that has the responsibility for this. How do they know if the provinces are even monitoring their programs well? There needs to be better coordination and better information-sharing. I think the overall evaluation is really important, and you would expect there would be more discussion about the job categories. Maybe they would not necessarily be directly in line, but if they have job categories that are completely different from the 38 federal ones, you would expect some explanation as to why that is.