Last week, the Future Skills Council released a document called “Canada – A Learning Nation: A Skilled, Agile Workforce Ready to Shape the Future”.  I thought we should delve into it early in the week before we all get too tired.  So here goes:

For starters, we should be clear about who is releasing this.  This is the Future Skills Council (a group of worthies from across the country who advise the Minister of Employment and Social Development on…things…) and not the Future Skills Centre (the big honking sort-of-independent organization which gives out money in order to “experiment” with skills, set up a few years ago by the feds, led by Ryerson and the Conference Board).  The two, believe it or not, have nothing to do with one another.  Nor is it the Future Skills Office, which you’ve probably never heard of, but is the name given to the group of people in ESDC who ride herd on the Centre (but ssshh!  We can’t say that out loud because the Centre is supposed to be independent) and who also act as a resource for the Council.  (Yes, it does appear that “Future Skills” has become the Ottawa equivalent of “Bruce” in the Philosophy Department of the University of Woolloomoolloo, but presumably all this makes sense to someone in government).  Anyways: this paper is from the Council, not Centre or Office, though as we’ll see, the Office probably had a lot to do with it).

So here is my 23-word summary of the report: 

It is a 50-page document.  That purports to provide a vision of learning in Canada.  And it uses the word “provinces” exactly twice.

Ponder that for a moment.  What kind of document can purport to be a document about learning in Canada if it does not include any discussion of the role of government which runs, funds, and oversees actual institutions of learning?  “Not a very good one,” I think is the nicest thing you can say about this effort.  “Total waste of time” would be nearer the mark. 

To put the best possible spin on this document: it is a fairly pious wish list of things that it would be just great if someone would do.  And I do mean pious.  Here are a sample of the hard-hitting recommendations: “encourage more collaboration”, “replicate promising practices”, “focus on growth areas”, “address geographic barriers” (swear to God, I am not making this up).  The document contains lots of “recommendations” and “action areas”, but leaves it unclear about to whom they directed.  The feds?  The provinces?  Employers?  Without any suggestion about who should be doing what, it’s hard to see what this document is meant to accomplish. 

And that’s the best possible spin.  The alternative is much worse: that the Council itself did not have much say in what went in here, that it was instead written almost entirely by the Future Skills Office and it is therefore less a pious wish-list than it is a stalking horse for a whole bunch of ESDC-specific priorities.  In which case, you need to read at least part of this as not a “learning strategy” but “a strategy for a bunch of stuff ESDC wants to do on its own without talking to provinces.”

For instance, the first of the document’s five priority areas has to so with Labour Market Information (LMI).  Now, I am not against better LMI, but the federal government’s long-held view that LMI is important less for purposes of educational program planning than because it is some kind of cure for unemployment in and of itself is kind of disturbing.  There are a whole bunch of recommendations around LMI, career planning, and transparency re: how courses relate to skills.  These skills in turn relate to jobs which, even if it were all possible for the Feds to do this properly (and I have deep, deep reservations about that) amount to saying that the Government of Canada should build a really big jobs and skills website.  Seriously, that’s all it is, a website.  I would merely point out here that it was Rachel Wernick (the ESDC ADM who was somewhat unfairly placed at the centre of the WE Charity controversy), who correctly pointed out back in the summer that the Government of Canada is crap at digital (I am, of course, paraphrasing).  The idea that a government-run career website is one of five key pillars to making Canada a learning nation is something that could only occur to someone who does not actually run any part of the educational system. 

(Also: has everyone forgotten that under the Harper government, ESDC poured several million dollars into a nearly identical “labour market information website” that ended up never launching, mainly – so it is rumoured – because it was irretrievably crap?  Seems like it might be an important precedent to go back and learn from.)

Bad websites might be a waste of time, but they are at least mostly harmless.  Where it gets trickier is in the fourth priority; “Promote, enable and validate skills development and training in all their diverse forms”.  Lots of what is in here is of the pious-wish-addressed-to-no-one-in-particular variety (e.g. “develop and expand access to nimble training models”).  But there is some specific wording in there on skills and micro-credentials which seems vague and harmless unless you recall September’s Speech from the Throne which hinted that Federal government might soon be in the business of “accrediting” skills.  Still not clear what that means if anything, but my spidey senses are still tingling on this one.  This is not a road the federal government should head down: disaster lies this way.

Anyways, few ESDC skills papers are any good and most of them die quickly, so it’s not that there is very much unique about this one.  Still, I can’t help feeling disappointed.  I mean one of the alleged benefits of having a Skills Council is that it might have a little bit of independent perspective, yet this is obviously government prose, and Ottawa government prose at that.  An independent Skills Council – especially one with a freaking provincial ADM sitting on it – might have tread some unorthodox paths to incorporating provincial perspectives and generating some useful pan-Canadian energy around a skills agenda.  But no, instead we have (let me say it again) a 50-page paper on skills in which the word province appears twice.

It is not impossible to make federalism work in areas of shared jurisdiction.  Germany manages it quite well.  But it requires a commitment to talking and a willingness to compromise.  Constantly. Federalism is a skill: if you stop exercising that skill it will atrophy and wither.  Unfortunately, today’s Government of Canada simply can’t be bothered to keep in shape.