Questions? Comments? E-mail Robert T. Chisholm, Associate Member OSPE,
at attention_to_the_facts@hotmail.com
A1.10. WHAT
MUST WE DO IN ORDER TO GET TO FULL EMPLOYMENT?
Again, the comments in
this section apply as much to the NCR as they do to Ontario as a whole and to
Canada as a whole
One part of this is generating enough
jobs / exports, helping businesses succeed in expanding employment as well as
revenues and profits for the owners. There are many aspects to being able to
achieve this. It will not be possible to do this “overnight”. The current size
of the problem represents a huge “backlog” that has been increasing and going
un-noticed for at least the past 30 years. It cannot be “explained away” simply
by reference to U.S. sub prime mortgage crisis and the financial “crash” that
started in about September 2008 with the failure of Lehman Brothers in New
York.
RADICAL IMPROVEMENTS IN ACCESSIBILITY TO FUNDED RETRAINING ARE NECESSARY.
Current problems involve lack of access to retraining
to get prepared for new kinds of work as skill sets requirements change, based
on dysfunctional federal E.I. rules and provincial social assistance
rules.
Reference: Ontario/federal Labour Market Agreement,
effective April 1st 2008
This Agreement supposedly made it clear that
retraining was supposed to be available to anybody out of work - but it did not
actually do so in practice.
Further problems have involved the misguided
/inappropriate application of over-complex rules (that should never have been
present in the first place) governing accessibility to funded retraining.
Instead, the emphasis must be exclusively on
facilitating the conversion of people out of work back into taxpayers and
instituting appropriate new rules for that purpose.
In October 2012, the Ontario government produced a
report on improving social assistance programs in Ontario:-
Reference: ”Brighter Prospects: Transforming Social
Assistance in Ontario”. Authors: Frances Lankin and Munir A. Sheikh –
Commissioners / Commission for the Review of Social Assistance in Ontario. Submitted to The Honourable John Milloy,
Minister of Community and Social Services.
The lessons of this and earlier reports must be
learned by everyone involved. Over the years, the emphasis has been on assuming
that people out of work are in that position because of personal deficiencies,
with no acknowledgement of the conditions actually necessary for them to
succeed. The said conditions include satisfactory jobs in sufficient numbers
and satisfactory access to retraining where needed, among other things.
We need a better method for defining the problem mathematically,
in order to have a realistic idea of the size and character of the problem at
any given time. This has been attempted in the author’s own analysis from 2007
given to the Canadian Labour Congress at around the time of the “Stop the SPP”
protests in Montebello, Quebec and elsewhere in August 2007:-
Reference: “PROPOSAL: MEASURING
“UNDER-EMPLOYMENT” AND “OVER-WORK” ”, June 2007
It should be emphasized that this is still a work in progress, which has
not had wide peer review as yet.
It relates to Canada as a whole which includes the NCR and Ontario.
There are also serious problems with the
administrative tribunals referred to under Sub-appendix 1.4 :-
A1.4.
FOREIGN TRAINED PROFESSIONAL IMMIGRANTS TO CANADA; “PROMISES”; CONTRACT
OF EMPLOYMENT “FIDDLE”.
And under Sub-appendix
1.5:-
A1.5 ADDITIONAL INDICATIONS OF FLAWED APPROACH TO
DATE; SOME CAUSES OF THIS; SOME REFERENCES.
These must also be dealt with. There is no excuse for
these tribunals being allowed to exploit the “letter of the law” and refusing
to use any common sense - in order to make rulings which simply serve to (a)
prevent people out of work from becoming taxpayers again, though gainful
employment, and (b) deny or undermine their Charter rights to life and security
of the person, by ignoring economic and social rights.
Questions?
Comments? E-mail Robert T. Chisholm, Associate Member OSPE, at attention_to_the_facts@hotmail.com
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