Madam Speaker, if that is true, I accept it but it certainly is the kind of behaviour I have experienced in the committee as I have tried to bring forward some very important issues on behalf of the volunteer not for profit sector in our communities as they try to understand the new process in place of requests for proposal from the ministry.
In my community of Sault Ste. Marie, the Canadian Hearing Society has been delivering for a number of years very valuable and important support to the deaf, deafened and hard of hearing. It has lost its contract and does not know why. There has never been any indication that it has done anything wrong or has not been performing up to par or beyond.
As a matter of fact, the ministry offered the contract to the March of Dimes. The March in Dimes in turn wrote a letter to say that it could not deliver on the program as it did it not have the expertise to do so. What happened? HRSD said that it was too bad. It has gone back to the March of Dimes and is now in the process of trying to convince it that it should deliver that program. Is that cooperation? Is that called working with partners which are in the not for profit and voluntary sectors? I say not.
There used to be a very cooperative team approach in Sault Ste. Marie whenever new business or industry indicated that it wanted to come to Sault Ste. Marie. All of the not for profit voluntary organizations used to come together under the name “Team Sault Ste. Marie”. They would meet with a new potential employer, ascertain what the needs were, set up training opportunities, work with different funding sources to ensure that the money needed and available could be brought to the challenge and offered to a new company. New hiring halls would be set up. The list goes on of the kind of cooperation that took place. The whole community was the benefactor of that.
We now have an environment in my community and every community across the province where there is competition. People are looking askance at each other and that cooperative approach is slowly but surely moving away. That is how the ministry carries out its mandate in this instance. There is still no action from the Department of Human Resources and Skills Development to address that challenge.
Three or four agencies across the province have lost their funding. The day before the investigation review began in our committee, the ministry advised them that they lost their funding. I wrote to ask for a moratorium. The Bloc also wrote to ask for a moratorium. I know labour organizations across the province gathered with these communities and held a public press conference in which they also asked for a moratorium on this until we could get to the bottom of it. We wanted to find our why so many of these long serving, valuable and excellent agencies had lost their funding. However, they lost their funding anyway and there was no moratorium.
Now as we move to put together what I think is a good set of recommendations to the ministry, these agencies, which are caught up with what the ministry agreed was a faulty process, will not have their issues addressed. They will not get their funding back. They will not be around to take advantage of any new approach that might happen after the valuable work of the committee on this file.
That is why I encourage my caucus not to support legislation to give power to a ministry that still does not seem to understand what it needs to do and how it needs to act in communities to deliver first class training, employment and support to unemployed workers and students across the country.