ALL SIDES ATTACK $2.4B JOB TRAINING
No monitoring to see if it helped Indigenous
OTTAWA • MPs in all three major parties hammered federal officials this week for what the auditor general earlier called an “incomprehensible failure” involving $2.4 billion spent on job training for Indigenous people since 2010.
Officials with Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) appeared before the public accounts committee this week to explain how the department is trying to monitor whether its training programs actually help Indigenous people find stable jobs.
A spring report from the auditor general found Ottawa doesn’t know if its programs for Indigenous people are helping them find sustainable work, despite paying more than $300 million a year.
The report focused on the Aboriginal Skills and Employment Training Strategy and the Skills and Partnership Fund, which give funding to Indigenous organizations that provide training and skills development.
“The key thing that was supposed to happen in this program was monitoring, and you failed,” said NDP MP David Christopherson. “Why, why, why do we have consistent failure when it comes to our Indigenous sisters and brothers?”
Liberal MP Chandra Arya raised concerns about the amount of money spent through the programs, which deputy minister Graham Flack pegged at $2.4 billion since 2010 for the Aboriginal skills strategy and $300 million for the skills and partnership fund.
“We don’t know if that has been used effectively, and if any good has come out of that,” he said.
“Don’t you think that this is sort of unacceptable and too uncomfortable to hear that number?”
Conservative MP Kevin Sorenson, the committee’s chair, suggested ESDC is hampering progress on reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.
“I can tell you, sometimes you wonder how you gauge a government,” he said.
“Well, you gauge a government on results, and sometimes the departments are the ones that carry out the government mandate.”
Last spring, Auditor General Michael Ferguson found that ESDC had no way to know what kind of work Indigenous people who received training were finding afterward.
“So even if somebody got a part-time job or a job for five days working on a construction project, (the organizations) counted that as one of their clients getting a job, even though it was very short-term,” he said at the time.
The audit also found that funding amounts for Indigenous organizations “stayed largely the same year after year, regardless of the results they achieved,” and were based on population and socioeconomic data from 1996.
It also found the department failed to provide relevant labour market data those groups could use to prepare clients for available jobs.
The government is planning to replace the existing Aboriginal skills program with a new training program in April 2019.
Flack said the new program will aim to shrink the “skills gap” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people by 50 per cent, and the employment gap by 25 per cent.
According to the audit, the 2017 unemployment rate for Indigenous people was about 11 per cent, compared to six per cent for the rest of the population.
The department plans to start monitoring long-term results using a combination of social insurance numbers and Canada Revenue Agency filings to get a sense of clients’ job stability and income level after using the training programs. However, the data will have to be anonymous to protect privacy, meaning the department won’t be able to track individual outcomes.
Flack said one of the challenges with measuring outcomes is that people tend to move after they get the training.
“If they subsequently move to a larger community, the organization that’s delivering the training doesn’t have access to that individual anymore and can’t measure it,” he said.
The department is also launching a pilot project to provide Indigenous organizations with labour market information, so they can tailor training to available jobs.
But Flack was very cautious about the prospects for success, since the information will be based on survey data from small communities, which is easily skewed if the response rate is low.
“I want to be clear with the committee that there is not a guarantee we’re going to succeed on this,” he said.
Officials said $342 million will be spent on the training programs this fiscal year, and an additional $99 million is being added to the budget next year, which Arya also questioned.
“Shouldn’t we just hold on to that until we see how to really set up something to measure it better before spending it?” Arya asked.