Hey, does anyone remember FutureSkills Lab?  That big idea that came out of the Barton Committee about a year and a half ago and included in the 2017 budget with at least moderate amounts of fanfare?  The one that was supposed to “identify skill gaps with employers, explore new and innovative approaches to skills development and share information so that Canadians are well equipped for opportunities in the new economy”?

It kind of seems to have died a quiet death, hasn’t it? I mean, according to the Budget, the organization – whatever the hell it’s eventually supposed to be called – is supposed to be spending $25 million this fiscal year.  It’s hard to see how anyone’s going to spend that kind of money when there’s no organization, no governing board, no staff and we’re already two months into the fiscal.

How did we get to this place?  Simple enough.  When Barton & Co, recommended the creation of a FutureSkills Lab they were clear that it needed to be designed “along the lines of the Canada Institute for Health Information (CIHI)”.  CIHI is a model that always gets dragged out in discussions about education and skills because it’s a model which seems to have allowed both levels of government to co-operate on data-sharing and policy learning in a similar field (in the sense that like education, it’s clearly a provincial jurisdiction but the feds simply have to have a presence in the field because reasons).

There’s a problem with the CIHI model, though.  In brief, CIHI works because although it is funded by the federal government, the governance is mostly in the hands of provincial appointees (the feds have two seats on a 16-seat Board).  But that’s not the problem.  The problem is that Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) is – apparently – literally incapable of comprehending the idea that working in areas of provincial jurisdiction requires substantial provincial buy-in and control over governance.  And so, for the past 15 months, ESDC has been flailing around trying to work out how it could take this idea for a CIHI-like skills organization and keep it completely in-house, where they could control it.

(For a 100% correct explainer on how a FutureSkills Lab should be run, read the Mowat Centre’s report on that subject, available here.  ESDC has done everything in its power to ignore this piece).

Publicly, there is no news at all about FutureSkills Lab.  Privately, much of Ottawa is buzzing about rumours leaking out of ESDC Headquarters (that concrete pustule on the north side of the Ottawa river, the whimsically-named “Phase IV”) to the effect that ESDC has decided to “outsource” FutureSkills Lab and is consequently preparing a “request for proposals” which will shortly be made public (rumour mill is vague about what “shortly” means here, but my guess is it goes out in the next six weeks with a due date in late summer).  Big players in public policy and evaluation – notably the Social Research and Demonstration Corporation (SRDC) – are gearing up to bid on…well, no one seems quite sure what, but they’re getting ready anyway.

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What to make of this?  Well, it depends a bit on what it is that is actually being outsourced.  In theory, FutureSkills Lab has four tasks: 1) deciding what kinds of experiments to fund/analyze (not everything that could be analyzed needs to be funded, but with the kind of budget they’re talking about, there are clearly some funded projects to be organized and delivered), 2) doing the analysis, 3) doing the PR and communications to spread “good practice” (some people refer to this as “knowledge mobilization” but it’s kind of a loathsome term) and 4) doing something – it’s really not clear what – on Labour Market Information.  Are all four of these being sent out for outsourcing?  Only one or two of them?  If more than one, are the RFPs separate or is it a package deal?  No one seems to know.

The central dilemma, of course, is how that first task is handled.  One possibility is that ESDC expects to keep that piece for itself and what is being outsourced are the other pieces.  In one sense, this would be very much in line with expectations: no one (I don’t think) ever expected a FutureSkills Lab to actually perform evaluations; that always seemed like a good thing to outsource (with SRDC most likely winning a very big chunk of the work because they’re very good at this stuff).  But on the other hand, it would be a political disaster because the governance would still be 100% in federal hands, which is *precisely* the wrong approach.

Another possibility is that the feds are literally outsourcing the entire thing, including the governance, to a third party. In one sense, this would be better because it gets the governance out of federal hands, but it doesn’t solve the problem that the provinces have no role (that is, unless the forum of provincial labour market ministers were to set up a corporation to bid for it, an outcome which would be both fantastic and hilarious).  But it also raises the question of who the hell would be qualified to administer such a contract.  You’d need an organization with roots in various parts of the country, an ability to work fluently in both languages, the political nous to keep a lot of competing stakeholders happy, the administrative agility to hit the ground running and get many different projects up and running simultaneously and the research capability to actually do evaluations.  I can think of combinations of organizations that meet these qualifications (imagine SRDC + HEQCO + CIRANO + Polytechnics Canada plus one or two other partners from the coasts), but a single entity that can do all that?  Doesn’t exist.

The only model that ever made sense for this organization was CIHI: a purpose-built, federally-funded independent organization with substantial provincial control built in.  For reasons that defy comprehension, ESDC nixed that idea and the Prime Minister’s Office and Finance Department, for equally mystifying reasons, has allowed them to do this, thereby effectively strangling the initiative in its infancy.  If some kind of “outsourcing” is going to happen, that’s (probably) good in the sense that ESDC is backing away from 100% ownership, but it’s far from clear that it will actually fix any governance issues.

Keep an eye on this story – more fun to come I am sure.