Thank you very much for your question, Madam O'Neill-Gordon.
I don't know if you remember this, but in the 1984 election that was won by Brian Mulroney, the campaign focused on “jobs, jobs, jobs”, and by 1985 and 1986, his campaign had turned into “training, training, training”. I have to say that, unfortunately, I was around in those days, watching the training money being flowed through.
You can put a lot of people through training as a kind of stop-gap measure to say that you're doing something. Now, the money you're talking about is actually going towards opening up more training spaces. That is very welcome, but training does not necessarily create jobs. This is not Field of Dreams: train them and the jobs will come. We need job creation mechanisms in place, because we know that the self-employed rise as a proportion of the labour market when there aren't any jobs.
More training is great. That's terrific. But we actually have a strategic problem going forward. It isn't just training as a counter-cyclical measure that is required but training that is preparing our labour market to fill the breach and replace all those people who are going to be leaving the labour market. They may have to delay their retirement for a few years because their retirement savings have just dried up. But we know that in the next 10 years there is going to be a labour shortage. You think you have a labour shortage now in health care? Wait five or 10 years. We have no strategic plan. Where are we putting our training money? Are we going to make sure that those services that Canadians have a statutory right to receive--health and education--are serviced in the public sector? Will we have enough bodies to provide the health and education services that Canadians expect as a right of citizenship, and should expect in a country as advantaged as ours?
It's very important to have a counter-cyclical stimulus, and training is always welcome. It's always better to be smarter than to be stupider. If you think training isn't an answer, don't try ignorance. But the truth is that we need a strategic plan that uses those dollars, that magnificent amount of dollars that is there, that says we are laying in place a plan with our partners at the provincial level because we know what is coming down the road and we are preparing for it.
That is absent.