According to a CBC report, the feds are definitely going with a Singapore-style Individual Learning Account (ILAs).  Which, you know, leaves me awfully smug about yesterday’s blog, which by pure coincidence profiled that very system, leaving me looking quite undeservedly prescient.  So, is it even worth going ahead and looking at the French system, as I promised?  Well, yes, because there’s another potential element to the whole learning accounts thing, which is worth delving into and where the French absolutely show us the way.

Back in 2004, the French government created something called the droit individual à la formation or DIF.  Under this system, all salaried employees in a position for at least one year obtained a right to twenty hours of training.  This right to train could be carried forward for a limit of six years, creating (in theory) a right to up to 120 hours of training leave in a single year.  This wasn’t necessarily a right to paid leave, exactly.  If the training occurred during working hours, the employees would be paid regular salary, but it could also be taken outside of work hours, in which case the employee would be paid a training allowance equal to half their hourly wage for the hours of training.  The costs of the training were also borne by the employer (who consequently must sign off on the type of training chosen), though how those costs are borne exactly gets complicated.  To avoid getting caught up in the weeds of France’s training levy system, we’ll ignore this aspect for the moment.

In 2015, the DIF system was replaced by a new program, the compte personnel de formation (CPF).  Be careful about that word “compte”: it doesn’t actually mean “account” in the usual ILA/Singapore sense.  CPF is not really all that different from DIF.  It’s the employer paying for the training under more or less the same conditions.  It’s the same annual right to hours, only now it can accumulate up to 150 hours over 8 years.  The big difference is that it is universal for all individuals 16 years and up and not just limited to those in permanent positions.

As should be clear, the French system of “accounts” is quite different from the other kinds of ILAs.  It is not so much a financial transfer from government to citizen as it is a government-created statutory right to training (in the same way that, for instance, governments legislate a right to holiday time).  So why does it get labelled as a kind of “account”?  Because in one very key way, it is an account – a time account.  When you move jobs, your accumulated entitlement to paid time off moves with you.  And the right to have the employer pay is universal, so in a sense that moves with the individual as well.

This matters a lot because studies continually show that for working-age mid-career adults, getting the time to train is at least as important a barrier to training as getting the money to train.  Simply handing out money, as is the usual routine with Learning Accounts, doesn’t make a dent in that problem.

A French-style system of “accounts” would be difficult to make work in Canada because of the way the payment mechanism is built around a training levy that most of Canada does not possess (though Quebec, which does, might find it a convenient way to pursue adult training).  But the core notion of a statutory right to time off for training is an interesting one.  There’s no reason that something like that couldn’t be legislated here in Canada, either as a universal right, or tied to hours in the way EI is.  An initiative like that, combined with ILAs (maybe not quite Singapore-style, but something similar), could be quite interesting and might create a real change in the culture of training in Canada.

Might we see something like that in next week’s budget?  Read that CBC story carefully, and Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s quote in particular,  “In our budget this year that’s what we are going to be thinking about…how do we help Canadians to take time off? How do we ensure that they can continue to live their life while they are taking time off? And how do they pay for their training?”  He doesn’t draw the link explicitly, but sticking the time issue and the training affordability issue into neighbouring sentences suggests to me that maybe, just maybe, the Government is at least partially thinking along French lines.

We’ll know for sure on Tuesday, I guess.  In the meantime, bon weekend.