Mixed reactions to federal budget

There is “a ring of an opportunity missed” in this week’s federal budget, said Humber president John Davies.

He is disappointed in the lack of a national skills agenda and the lack of investment in infrastructure.

“Infrastructure would be great for business and that affects students too in terms of getting jobs,” he said. He added he was pleased there was an investment in student grants.

The budget commits $123 million over four years to streamline the Canada Student Loans Program and $350 million to a new Canada Student Grants Program that replaces the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, which expires next year. Funding for both takes effect in 2009.

Tyler Charlebois, director of advocacy for the College Student Alliance, the advocacy organization that represents HSF, said he is optimistic with the budget.

“It’s got money in it for post-secondary education. It’s got money around financial aid,” he said. “Now, that money doesn’t come until 2009-10 and there are a lot of sources of vagueness around the structure of many programs but there’s room in there for us to get in there and massage the fine details.”

Rob Savage, a spokesperson for Colleges Ontario, the advocacy organization for Ontario’s colleges, said the colleges are generally dissatisfied with the budget.

“The budget failed to address the issues around capacity and the need to really invest in the colleges themselves,” he said. “There’s support for students, which helps address the supply side, but in terms of meeting the demand for new students the budget hasn’t really made the investment into colleges for the infrastructure.”

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Skills shortage crisis looms

Humber has a large role to play in addressing the impending skills shortage in Ontario, said college president John Davies.

“I think it’s an agenda whose time has definitely come,” he said. “Colleges are essential to the training and re-training of people relative to the skills shortage in the province.”

Colleges Ontario, the advocacy organization for the province’s 24 public colleges, is working with provincial and federal governments to develop a skills training strategy to help avert a labour shortage crisis in the future.

The initiative is being led by the Ontario Workforce Shortage Coalition, a group that includes Colleges Ontario, the College Student Alliance, and 18 industry associations from every sector of the economy.

A report issued by the Conference Board of Canada last September says Ontario will face a shortage of more than 360,000 workers by 2025, despite current layoffs in sectors such as manufacturing.

Linda Franklin, president and CEO of Colleges Ontario, said the problem needs to be addressed now.

“We’re going to face a really serious challenge in Ontario if we don’t get started now in fixing it. The longer we go on, the more exponentially this challenge grows,” she said at a Queen’s Park meeting of the government’s standing committee on finance and economic affairs last week.

The coalition is recommending the creation of a skill council to help bring government, educators, employers, and labour together to address the issue.

Franklin said part of the problem is providing workers with skills that are transferable across sectors and can be obtained quickly.

“It’s not terribly helpful to train people quickly for a job only to find out that they’re laid off again with no core skills,” she said.

Tyler Charlebois, director of advocacy for the College Student Alliance, told the committee that increasing employment of under-represented groups such as women, aboriginals, the disabled, immigrants and adults without high school education would help the shortage by increasing their skills and getting them into the workforce.

He said that if adults aged 25 to 64 with high school or less education had the same employment rate as those with college credentials, 289,000 of them would have jobs.

“That’s a huge figure and a huge number of Ontarians who are not finding employment because they do not have the education that is needed. With 70 per cent of all jobs needing at least some form of post-secondary education, we need to start retraining and we need to start making sure the education and the accessibility of our institutions are there.”

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