COMMENT
A4
TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2014
Finding the common good I’ll bet very few Canadians know (or care) about the Manning Networking Conference that occurred in Ottawa over the weekend. But the value of networking couldn’t have been better expressed by the agreement announced there regarding the Canada Jobs Grant. Some important deadlines GREG needed to be NEIMAN met here: the Labour Market Agreements (LMAs) that currently take federal money to fund employment training programs in the provinces all expire on March 31. The provinces seemed to be happy with their LMA programs and probably would have quickly signed on for another round of the same. But the feds and a lot of business groups were not happy. The disconnect is most visible in Alberta and Saskatchewan, where unemployment is not the problem. Lack of skills in the labour force for the jobs available is. And for reasons not explained, LMAs haven’t been filling the gap. Consider: 2013 was a weak year for job growth in Canada. It was the weakest since 2009, actually — and that was during the so-called Great Recession.
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You wouldn’t know that here, because 70 per cent of all job growth in Canada took place in Alberta. But in reality, 95 per cent of all new net jobs created were part time. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce suggests this reflects the large numbers of baby boomers who are not going into full retirement, but are staying on as part-time workers. Older females taking part-time jobs, for instance, comprised a large component of that growth. But even as unemployment remains stubbornly high in Canada, businesses are complaining they can’t find workers qualified for the jobs they’re offering. That may be explained by demographics — how many older workers want to be welders or long-haul truckers? Just the same, the feds put about $4 billion a year into a whole platform of job training programs. It’s the highest public investment in the OECD. For that much money, a government should expect better results in matching people with good jobs. At the same time, Canadian business investment in skills training is the lowest in the OECD — yet a sector that invests very little is griping about the quality of workers the training programs produce. Kind of a disconnect there, wouldn’t you say? So in the 2013 budget, the Canada Jobs Grant was announced to replace the LMA programs set to expire at the end of this month. The plan was that the federal government, the provinces and industry
would become equal partners in job training, for careers that Canadian industry can offer immediately. Each would contribute to a maximum total of $15,000 per worker — with a guaranteed job at the end for each participant. Guess what? The provinces went ballistic. They weren’t consulted. A lot of current LMA funding is going to areas of chronic low employment: among aboriginals, disabled people and immigrants. By their own parameters, the programs are working. But not too many aboriginals want to leave home provinces to come to Alberta to work in camps building refineries or oilsands plants. Small business groups also complained. You can’t ask a contractor to put up $5,000 to train a worker who will promptly leave for more pay at a larger firm — which then gets a trained worker for free. In the end, the federal government discovered they had to play nice with everyone. After first asserting that they would proceed after March 31, with or without provincial participation (and the loss of funding for the LMAs), Employment Minister Jason Kenney started listening. Now, small businesses need only put up a few hundred dollars per worker — and even that much money can be accounted for in wages or presumably the supply of tools or equipment. The provinces get four years to either wind down their LMAs, or slowly find provincial dollars to replace federal money that will be gradually
withdrawn. The whole program gets a review in 2015. And nothing changes until July, instead of March. Only Quebec remains outside of the program. But that province already has a European-style three-part program for jobs training that includes the cooperation of government, business and trade unions. In fact, Kenney says he’s soon to visit Germany to study their skills training network — and it looks a whole lot more like Quebec’s than Alberta’s. The bottom line is that everyone found out they need to co-operate if they want to see the money put where it’s needed. They all also need to put some skin in the game if they want credible comment on the outcome. And everyone needs to keep a little perspective here. The experience of Alberta and Saskatchewan is vastly different than that of high-immigrant B.C., for instance, or of Nova Scotia, which has far less wiggle room in its budget to replace any lost federal dollars. One size does not fit all. Kenney likes to repeat he is confident the program will become so attractive, it will quickly be oversubscribed. Is that a signal of new re-allocations of their $4 billion-per-year training investment, of which the Canada Jobs Grant is only a small part? If so, let’s hope there’s a bit more co-operation and consultation, next time around. Greg Neiman is a retired Advocate editor. Follow his blog at readersadvocate. blogspot.ca or email greg.neiman.blog@ gmail.com.
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A premature history of the second Cold War The first mistake of the Ukrainian revolutionaries was to abandon the agreement of Feb. 23 to create a national unity government, including some of the revolutionary leaders, that would administer the country until new elections in December. It would have left President Viktor Yanukovych in office until then, but with severely diminished powers, as the constitution would have been changed to restore the authority of parliament. Leaving a man who ordered the murder of dozens of protesters in power even temporarily was a bitter pill to swallow, but it had tacit Russian support because it saved President Vladimir Putin’s face. GWYNNE However, the crowds on InDYER dependence Square refused to accept the deal, and Yanukovych was forced to flee. Parliament subsequently ratified his removal, but it was the mob, and especially the right-wing fighting groups like Praviy Sektor, who led, and the leadership who followed. Putin was humiliated, and he was given the pretext for claiming that Ukraine had fallen to a “fascist coup” as a justification, however flimsy, for rejecting the legitimacy of the new Ukrainian government. The second grave error — and this one was entirely unforced — was the new government’s decision to
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repeal the law giving Russian equal status as an official language in provinces with large Russian-speaking populations. It delighted Ukrainian-speaking ultra-nationalists in the west of the country, but it needlessly alienated the two-fifths of Ukraine’s population who speak Russian as their first language. So now Putin is bringing pressure on the new Ukrainian government by backing a secessionist movement in Crimea (where three-fifths of the people speak Russian). The rubber-stamp Russian parliament has also granted him authority to use Russian troops elsewhere in Ukraine to “protect” Russians — by which it seems to mean Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine who speak Russian, although they are not actually under attack. The Ukrainian army has been mobilized, and actual fighting could be only days away if the Russians invade eastern Ukraine, or attack the encircled Ukrainian garrisons in Crimea. Maybe Putin is just bluffing; more likely, he doesn’t yet know himself how far he is willing to go. But one thing generally leads to another, and some bluffs are hard to walk away from. Are we on the brink of a new Cold War? It wouldn’t be a hot war, except in Ukraine. Nobody will send troops to defend Ukraine, nor should they. Nobody is in position to stop Russia from conquering Ukraine if it chooses to, and turning it into a wider European war (or a world war) would not help. In any case, Moscow would probably not try to conquer all of Ukraine. Kyiv and the west would fight very hard, and after they were defeated they would continue to resist a Russian occupation with guerilla
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tactics, including terrorism. Putin doesn’t need that, so part of Ukraine would remain free, and call for outside help. It would come, in the form of financial and military aid, and maybe even what has hitherto been rigorously excluded from the discussion: NATO membership. And there Russia and everybody in NATO would sit for the next five or 10 or 20 years in a frozen confrontation that would include a trade embargo, an arms race, and a remote but real possibility of a nuclear war. This is not at all what Putin intends or expects, of course. He is calculating that once he controls the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, he will be able to enforce a restructuring of the country as a federation in which the government of the eastern, Russianspeaking part will be permanently under Russia’s thumb, and will have a veto on the decisions of the central government. But Putin’s calculations about Ukraine have been wrong every single time since the turn of the century. He backed Yanukovych before 2004, and the Orange Revolution proved him wrong. He backed Yanukovych even more enthusiastically after 2010; the policy blew up in his face again. And here he is yet again, backing Yanukovych as the president-in-exile of his Russia-friendly fantasy version of Ukraine. His calculations are wrong. If he continues down this road, he will cause a quite needless political disaster. Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
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