Yesterday I riffed on the possibility of a Skills Budget. Today I want to focus on some early clues about what’s in the upcoming budget by parsing last month’s pre-budget consultation report of the House of Commons Finance Committee.

To put this in some kind of context: a Finance Committee report may bear no resemblance whatsoever to the final budget project.  Basically, the chair of the finance committee (currently PEI’s Wayne Easter) takes dictation from the Finance Minister with respect to budget themes but not with respect to specific proposals.  Basically, his job is to beat the bushes for ideas salient to ones being pushed internally by the Finance Department. Sometimes the ideas the committee brings back are loopy and the report is ignored; sometimes their ideas are thoughtful, and the report has an impact on the policy process (although honestly, it’s been several years since any such impact was major).  It’s kind of a crapshoot.  But while you shouldn’t take the Finance Committee text as a guide to what Bill Morneau will do, you can take it as a reasonable proxy for what the Liberal caucus thinks are good ideas.

Obviously, the report goes into all kinds of stuff that has nothing to do with PSE.  But in the areas where it does: oy, what a mess of half-bakedness.

Under research, the recommendations include (all direct quotes):

• Invest in a program encouraging Canadian leadership in the application of quantum computing to businesses, governments and research environments.
• Support the pan-Canadian, university led Canadian Neutron Initiative to ensure that Canada maintains our place among leaders in materials research in priority areas, such as producing and storing clean energy, growing the economy through advanced manufacturing and clean technologies, and promoting health through biomedical and life sciences.
• Consider investing in programs that would allow Canada to become a leader in the commercialization of technologies to recycle, recover, or transform all plastics by 2040.
• Provide funding to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Canadian Institutes of Health Research, on par with the level seen in the 2018 Budget.
• Support the institutional costs of research to bring all postsecondary educational institutions up to a 25% reimbursement rate in year one and to 30% in six years.

So, the first three are in serious <headdesk> territory.  The whole scientific community came together last year to convince the government to fund the granting councils and stop with all the boutique science investment nonsense and the government made a big show of saying “yes, we understand.” Yet, here we are 10 months later when some in the research community are back to pleading for their own area and MPs are happy to oblige.  Maddening.  The fourth one is almost incomprehensible: I think it means “neither increase nor decrease the budget for research from where it was last year” but that’s very odd – usually recommendations imply change.  The fifth one is fine, and I will rejoice if it happens, but indirect costs of research are maybe the least sexy policy area ever and I’m not optimistic.

Then there are the PSE-focused recommendations (direct quotes):

• Support the expansion of post-secondary education delivered in the territories and remote communities, including community-based research and programming, to ensure a sustained, culturally-safe, post-secondary option for Indigenous students and their families.
• Provide funding over five years to support analysis of post-secondary education outcomes for First Nations, Inuit and Métis students.
• Provide increased funding over five years for Indspire’s scholarship and bursary program.
• Implement student loan forgiveness for social workers in rural and remote communities like for certain other professions.
• Renew funding for the Post-Secondary Institutions Strategic Investment Fund.

The most important one is the top one: the problem is the feds probably have no idea how expensive it is.  Getting the cost down so that we can do more of it is one of the most important tasks in Canada tight now, if you ask me, but no one is talking about it.  The second one is fine, but why just for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis?  It’s not like our outcomes data for the rest of the population is comprehensive.  The third is fine but weird considering that $50 million in PSSSP money for Indigenous people is up for renewal and you’d think that would be a bigger priority.  The fourth…I don’t see why politicians are so hot on restricting rural and remote communities hiring choices to those students who incur debt (and, more generally, if you are having trouble attracting people to some parts of the country, pay them more).  The fifth one mostly tells you that Universities Canada has run out of useful ideas for lobbying and so is falling back on that old faithful, “infrastructure spending”

Now, to the skills recommendations.  My favorite is probably number 48, which just says “Launch a National Work-Integrated Learning Strategy”.  That’s it.  No more details: just, “launch one”.  But number 50 is good, too: “partner with academia and the private sector to invest in numeracy and literacy training in order to increase productivity in a knowledge-based economy”.  Since this is a fairly precise definition of what institutions already do, it’s not clear what the committee is thinking of.

Anyways, here’s the rest of them:

• Incentivize small and medium-sized enterprises to partner with post-secondary institutions to expand work-integrated learning programs.
• Place emphasis on work-integrated learning funding for students from under-represented groups, including First Nations, Inuit and Métis students.
• Commit additional federal funding to the existing work-integrated learning matching platform to increase functionality and reach more employers.
• Increase funding for skills development, specifically in the two following programs that support investments in employee training and development:
  • Incentives for businesses through support of employee tuition and living costs for advanced training in agriculture, food and veterinary sciences; and
  • A skills initiative focused on connecting agri-business with academia, Mitacs and other government agencies, with high-calibre experiential international training as the overarching goal of the program.

• Support economic prosperity of Indigenous people by recognizing and supporting organizations that serve First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities and students through foundational learning and skills training.
• Enhance Indigenous employment training and apprenticeship programming in the resource, cultural, and tourism sectors.
• Increase funding for clearly defined pre-apprenticeship training that builds awareness and readiness among Canadian women to pursue and succeed in careers in the skilled trades.

So this big problem, the one the Liberals are so concerned about because technological change is causing anxiety to millions of Canadians, is apparently going to be solved by i) cutting cheques to employers to hire some students on for a couple of months and ii) cutting cheques to solve niche labour supply/demand problems (Indigenous tourism, women in construction, etc.).

That’s it.  That’s all the Liberal caucus could come up with.

All I can say is, this is some weak sauce.  Work-integrated learning may be a good idea, but it’s a tarted-up youth employment program, not something that speaks to middle Canada’s actual concerns about job security (WIL can be more than that, obviously, but my faith that universities, having received the necessary cheques, will actually proceed to the kind of curricular change that would make WIL genuinely effective is, shall we say, less than 100%.).

I am pretty sure neither Finance nor PMO is sufficiently blind to either reality of politics to make anything in here a budget centrepiece.  But what this paucity of reasonable thinking on skills should tell you is: if there is some big Liberal idea out there for skills, they haven’t yet told their backbench MPs about it.  Which suggests that whatever it actually is may still be well short of fully-baked, even this close to Budget Day.