Ottawa plans fi nal off er to provinces
Only challenge is that funds will be oversubscribed, says employment minister
OTTAWA — The Harper government will make a final offer within days to provinces in hope of settling a battle over $ 300 million a year in job training funds, Employment Minister Jason Kenney said Friday.
That offer includes a mechanism that could lead to an earlierthan- planned shutdown of Ottawa’s new Canada Jobs Grant, Kenney said.
Ottawa, he said, is considering some of the requests from provincial governments that have been infuriated by Ottawa’s plan to claw back from the provinces $ 300 million a year in transfers they use for an existing federal jobs program.
B. C. Jobs Minister Shirley Bond and her provincial counterparts asked Kenney earlier this month to consider several changes, including having a review after two years to determine if the new program is helping to fix Canada’s socalled “skills gap” problem.
That request is based partly on concerns that many companies might not be able to pay $ 5,000 to combine with $ 10,000 in government funding for short- term training of new workers.
“We’re not dogmatic about it, and if indeed an evaluation after a couple of years were to prove it’s not meeting its objectives, we wouldn’t force it to continue,” Kenney said.
But the minister said he doubts employers are all-talk, no- action on the training front.
He noted that if the program is funded by government to the tune of $ 300 million annually, that means the private sector would contribute a maximum $ 150 million.
“In a $ 1.8- trillion economy, where employers are telling us there are acute skill shortages, the only challenge of this program is that it will be massively oversubscribed,” he said. “It is quite a small amount of money in the context of what we spend overall on training.”
In 2008, the federal government began giving $ 500 million a year to the provinces for job training, saying it is mostly a provincial responsibility to help people on the workforce’s margins, such as the undereducated, aboriginals, new immigrants, youths, the disabled and older workers, to get into the job market.
Ottawa, complaining that the provinces weren’t doing a good job, announced last year that it was taking back $ 300 million of the $ 500 million, phased in over four years. In addition, the federal government asked provinces to come up with $ 300 million of their own money, or $ 5,000 a worker, though that request has been dropped.
The provincial counter- offensive has included the release of several studies, including one done by the federal government, indicating that the existing program has been a success.
Bond complained that the federal government was being unreasonable in declaring in this week’s federal budget that the new program will start on April 1.
The provinces have said they’d consider administering the new program if Ottawa made some concessions, and if its launch were delayed by six months.
Kenney said he’d agree to that delay for any province that agrees to his final offer.
He wouldn’t say if Ottawa is prepared to make concessions on the $ 300- million take- back. One of the provinces’ requests, according to media reports, is that the money be taken from other transfers, including the $ 2 billion a year spent on job training for EI recipients, and that the drawdown in transfers be spread out over six years.