Hollowing out the middle: Recasting federal workforce development programs
A CHAPTER BY DONNA E. WOOD IN ‘THE HARPER RECORD 2008-2015’
NOVEMBER 2015 – CANADA
All developed countries invest in workforce development. These are measures designed to attract and retain talent, solve skills deficiencies, improve the quality of the workplace, and enhance the competitiveness of local firms. They are also meant to incorporate the disadvantaged, integrate immigrants, and help the unemployed find work. Government intervention is necessary to improve market efficiency, promote equal opportunity, and ensure social and geographic mobility among citizens.
As a domain that straddles both social and economic policy, workforce development is particularly complicated in Canada. This is because our Constitution is ambiguous on whether this is an area of federal or provincial responsibility. Most programs, like postsecondary education and apprenticeship, are clearly under provincial control, but there is less certainty around measures to help the unemployed. Before the Second World War, it was accepted that these kinds of programs were under provincial responsibility. Often the federal government helped financially. After the devastation of the Depression in the 1930s, the federal government and all the provinces agreed, in 1940, to a constitutional amendment transferring significant responsibilities to Ottawa through a national unemployment insurance program.
By the 1990s, Ottawa dominated the policy area through a network of about 500 Canada Employment Centres across the country, delivering both income support and employment services. In 1996, the federal Liberal government offered to transfer responsibility for employment services back to the provinces. Ottawa kept responsibility for income support. It did this by concluding a series of agreements paid for out of money contributed by employers and workers to the employment insurance (EI) fund. Ottawa’s intention was to show “flexible federalism” following the Quebec referendum on sovereignty.
When the Harper Conservatives came to power in 2006, the job was half done, with devolved labour market development agreements or LMDAs signed in eight jurisdictions. There were co-managed agreements in the remaining five. The new government aspired to have “the best educated, most skilled, and most flexible workforce in the world.” To achieve this goal, not only did the government need to figure out what to do, but the equally important question of who should do it also needed to be worked out.
The chapter looks at the Harper government’s record in workforce development since 2006.