Quebec should opt into the job grant program

It is dismaying to see a good idea like the federal government’s proposed Canada Job Grant program bogged down in a morass of jurisdictional haggling.

The program offers an innovative response to the growing Canadian problem of jobs requiring particular skills going begging.

It is designed to support employers in their quest for trained employees, by allowing businesses to partner with post-secondary institutions to develop training programs that will mutually benefit employers and employees. Its innovative aspect is that employers directly participate in the training process, as opposed to merely having to hope they can find qualified workers from among the random pool of training-program graduates under long-standing government programs. First announced as part of last year’s federal budget, the initial plan for the Canada Job Grant program was to provide $5,000 in federal funding to employers per trainee, with the provincial governments and employers each contributing a similar amount, for a total of $15,000. But welcome as this might be to employers and employment seekers, it immediately ran into a wall of opposition from the provinces.

In the ensuing standoff, both sides have valid arguments. The provinces rightly maintained that job training falls within provincial jurisdiction. They further fretted that Ottawa proposed to take $300 million in funding for the program from the existing Labour Management Agreements under which provinces have been getting $500 million a year for their own training programs.

They also complained, with reason, that the proposed program had been sprung on them without consultation, an unfortunate habit of the current Conservative government, which has a history of not dealing well with provincial governments.

Ottawa, on the other hand, had a valid point in its contention that provinces are too often remiss in their accounting for targeted federal transfer payments.

After a year of fruitless negotiations, Ottawa upped the ante in this week’s federal budget. Its position is now that the federal government will assume delivery of the program in provinces that have not come to an agreement by April 1, and pay two-thirds of the allocation for participants, with employers kicking in the other third.

As might have been expected, there were howls from provincial capitals, with the loudest coming from Quebec City where Quebec Finance Minister Nicolas Marceau accused Ottawa of practising “predatory federalism” with its plan to take $70 million in transfer payments back from the province to fund its initiative. His Ontario counterpart, Charles Sousa, was barely more restrained, calling it “a kick in the teeth” for his province.

While some provinces have signalled they could reach a deal with Ottawa if certain concessions were made, Quebec is adamant that it wants to opt out of the program and use what would be its share of the money for its own job-training initiatives.

While it has a sound jurisdictional argument here, the Quebec government needs to recognize that the Canada Job Grant has been received favourably by many Quebec employers, and that this federal idea to bring employers more directly into job-training decisions is a good one — too good to be sacrificed in the interests of upholding jurisdictional prerogatives.