Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak tonight and follow up on a question I asked about the Canadian Council of Learning.
Earlier this week, my colleagues from York Centre and Winnipeg South Centre held a round table which was attended by a number of organizations whose funding had been cancelled by the Conservative government or, in some cases, whose funding was threatened to be cancelled.
CCL is one of those organizations whose funding was cancelled for absolutely no sensible reason. It was set up by the Liberal government in 2004 for five years, entirely renewable, to do an assessment of education in Canada. It produced some of the most remarkable and innovative documents in terms of understanding where we are as a nation in terms of education, particularly post-secondary, but also looking at aboriginal education, early learning and child care, and a number of things.
The government said that it was only a five year project and that it would never be renewed and yet, in a letter dated May 8, 2009 to the chair of CCL from the minister, the minister said, “I share your assessment that knowledge and skills are particularly important in these turbulent economic times and I agree that CCL has played a key role in supporting efforts in the area. Your desire for a clear and immediate resolution on the question of the council's future is understandable. I understand that HRSDC officials began discussions with CCL about stabilizing strategies for the organization”.
The government cannot say that it was never going to be renewed. What it can say is that it was killed for two simple reasons: first, that it was a Liberal initiated program; and second, that it worked. Who was watching this with amazement? A number of people were.
Arati Sharma of CASA said:
Without the research of groups, such as the Canadian Council on Learning, Canada will continue to lack the knowledge needed to improve access, persistence and quality in our post-secondary institutions. ,
The Toronto Star had an editorial saying:
...the learning council's work was of value to Canadians, particularly at a time when our economic future depends more than ever on our ability to compete with other knowledge-based economies....
We had an associate professor from the University of Alberta say:
This is a terrible, short-sighted action on the part of the Conservative government and I am so sorry to hear about it.
Don Drummond indicated on a number of occasions his very strong support for CCL, even at a time when he was actually doing a review for HRSDC.
I will quote an article from The StarPhoenix in Saskatoon which says, among other things:
The council's groundbreaking composite learning index to Canada and its online adult literacy assessment tests so impressed the OECD that its secretary general wrote to the Prime Minister last May praising the government for supporting the council's work and urging that it continue to be funded.
The Ottawa Citizen said, “The decision to cut funding to the CCL is very worrisome”.
Don Drummond's direct quote was, “It is disturbing. Even the scant information we have is not adequately funded”.
At a time when we say that we are interested in education, innovation, research and all those things that were started by the Liberal government early in this century, it makes no sense to cut this. This is one of the few tools that we had to measure how we were doing versus other countries. In fact, now that the funding has been cut, other countries want to fund CCL. Other countries have seen the value of it and yet our own country is so short-sighted that it has cut the funding to CCL and would not even let it carry forward the few million dollars it had when this year ended. It is a desperate situation. Students, universities, professors, economists and business organizations all know the value of CCL.
It appears that the government, for purely political reasons, decided that it would not continue to fund CCL and we are much the worse off for it.