Yes, exactly. When I began at the College, it was in the area of employment. I helped people who were jobless, and so on.
I was saying earlier that there are 42 service centres in Ontario where men and women who are jobless and have lost their way in life receive help. In Ontario, the colleges are service providers for both the federal and provincial governments. We bid on contracts, just as a private firm would, and we deliver training and mentoring products, as well as other services to these kinds of workers.
Too often I would be in an office and find myself in the middle, between the federal and provincial authorities. Some were responsible for the provincial Job Connect program for youth aged 16 to 24 and the others were responsible for the federal Youth Employment Strategy program for youth aged 15 to 30. We couldn't even agree on the age of the client base; also, when the provincial government gave jobless youth $1,000 to go back to work, the federal government would give them $1,100.
So, you're right: for years there was this kind of competition. There were discussions as to whether or not that was training. It is clearly a grey area. We're talking about the situation of a person with no job who is seeking employment and agrees to be retrained. At one point, we would be leaning towards training, and the battle would begin all over again. We were the victims of this sort of misunderstanding, but unfortunately, the client was even more victimized by it.
We have just signed an agreement in Ontario. The process for managing it and the actual name of the project have yet to be defined. We don't know whether it will be called “One Stop Shop”, “No Wrong Door Approach”, or something else altogether. I would like us to focus on attaining our goals, rather than on acronyms. What concerns me is that the federal principles are enshrined in the agreements when they're transferred to the provincial government. We don't want to fall victim to another disagreement between the federal and provincial governments with respect to workers. We want to look after the workers ourselves.