Focus on education and training to prepare for better times

Various provincial governments, over the next few weeks, will be finalizing their 2009-10 budgets. The question uppermost in their minds will be how best to assist their residents to cope with the current economic downturn.
My recommendation to each of the finance ministers would be to focus on education and training as their number one spending priority. Such a shift in focus would better prepare Canada to emerge from this recession with the most productive, innovative, and competitive workforce in the world.

More and more people are either seeing their jobs disappear or are feeling more and more vulnerable to the vagaries of the economic slowdown. It is imperative that we do everything in our power to provide them, as well as our young people who will be graduating into a period of reduced job prospects, with the opportunities for continuing education and training which will lead to even more productive employment down the road. Such a shift in focus, of course, will also require a shift in thinking, from the accepted belief in the importance of full and part-time employment to one of the importance of full and part-time education and training.
Such an education-based workplace revolution will require the full and coordinated cooperation of businesses, unions, educational institutions, and governments. Management and labour must make worker education and training a higher priority in collective bargaining agreements. If businesses cannot afford retraining workers as an alternative to retrenchment, they may at least be able to offer factory floors, office space, and hands-on instructors for training programs operated by educational and training institutions.


Most importantly, provincial governments, to whom our constitution grants jurisdiction over education, must make the difficult but necessary decision to assign education and training spending an even higher priority during recessionary times than in the past.
Where will the money come from?


You will note that in each province far more dollars are spent on health care than on education, with health care alone now consuming around 40% or more of the total budgets of Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and BC, and educational expenditures accounting for less than 15% of the total budgets of PEI, New Brunswick, Ontario (yes, Ontario), Saskatchewan, and Alberta.


When these figures and percentages are plotted over time, they show spiralling health-care spending progressively “eating up” provincial budgets to the point where other vitally important social service functions such as education and training are starved for funding. We simply cannot allow this trend to continue.
Of course, a shift in hundreds of millions of dollars from health care to education and training raises the question, how will we achieve and maintain high-quality health care?
The answer for Canada lies in finally biting the bullet and doing what most of the other industrialized countries in the world (including the European Union but with the exception of the US) have done, and that is establish a well-balanced two-track health-care system, providing for both public and private health-care insurance, delivery, and financing.
Before I am accused of using an increase in continuing education and training funding as a backdoor attack on public health care as practiced in Canada, it is best to remember that numerous comparative studies, by the OECD and Canadian think tanks, have demonstrated that two track health-care systems outperform the Canadian health-care system in virtually every category of health-care outcomes. And if President Obama adds public health-care insurance to the current American health-care system, the U.S. will also have a two-track system, leaving Canada even more out of sync.
While there is room for legitimate debate as to what should be the relationship between public and private health-care tracks, and what must be done to maintain high standards of care in both, those are the questions we should be debating rather than whether private health-care insurance, delivery, and financing should be permitted and encouraged.
To offer hundreds of thousands of Canadians productive educational and training opportunities as an alternative to unproductive and disheartening unemployment requires provincial governments to make education and training their number one spending priority. To do that requires major reforms in health-care financing and spending which heretofore has consumed an ever increasing share of provincial budgets. Which provincial government will take the lead in making this important and necessary transition?


By Preston Manning
President and CEO
Manning Centre for Building Democracy
Troy Media Corporation