Nearly a year after the 2013 provincial election, the B.C. government unveiled a plan to re-engineer the province’s education and training systems.
Funding, partnerships and new curricula would be needed to meet the one million jobs expected to open in the province by 2022, many of them requiring post-secondary education and training for trades and skills-based work. In the two years after the release of the “skills for jobs blueprint,” the government made good on many of its promises, earmarking nearly $8 million in new youth trades funding, opening more than 3,000 critical trades seats at post-secondary institutions and establishing a $30 million fund for skills training in First Nations communities.
The government also bumped up targeted post-secondary funding by $130 million in the first two fiscal years following the plan. Part of that funding – 25% of all post-secondary operating grants – was designated for education and training for in-demand occupations by 2017-18.
The 10 most in-demand types of jobs for the province’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) sector alone were expected to require more than 26,000 workers by 2018.
“A lot of the early-stage skills conversations and training conversations and funding was focused around LNG and around mining,” said Iglika Ivanova, a senior economist with the B.C. office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
LNG needs projections were based on five plants moving forward in B.C. between 2015 to 2024. None have gone ahead.
“[The province] put the blueprint for skills training in place mostly as a response to the demand around LNG to build a bunch of pipelines, because we don’t have the workforce in the province to have built five or six of them,” said NDP labour critic Shane Simpson, who is MLA for Vancouver-Hastings.
“The government responded to the companies who were looking at investment and restructured the skills training. It needed restructuring, but they did it in a way that really focused on one aspect of the economy, which was construction,” Simpson added. “It’s been a real struggle to get the government to move and support skills development in a more aggressive way.”
As an example, Simpson singled out the high-tech industry’s demand for more skilled talent, though this, too, has more recently been a B.C. government focus.
Launched in 2016, the government’s tech strategy laid out plans to raise the number of B.C. technology graduates by 1,000 per year by 2022. Last year, B.C. dedicated $1.3 million to co-operative education and $6 million toward coding and curriculum. It’s also working to ensure more than 600,000 students, from kindergarten to Grade 12, will experience curriculum changes that focus on math, sciences and skills required for careers in technology.
Ivanova called it a pivot from LNG to innovation.
“Which I don’t think is a bad thing,” she said. “But to me the idea that government can tie a significant chunk of its funding for education to what they think the job market needs right now is problematic. The thing with education is we’re training people in post-secondary institutions and then they’re going to work for 30 to 40 years or more, and we can’t predict what the jobs are going to look like.”
While predictions may be challenging, collecting data is a different story, and the B.C. government says it continues to work with the federal government to ensure its training initiatives respond directly to labour market data.
“One of the things we’ve spent a lot of time doing is having a better understanding of labour market data,” said Minister of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training Shirley Bond. “We need to make sure we’re training British Columbians, that we are bringing people into the job market who currently are not in the workplace. There are underrepresented groups – women, First Nations and persons with disabilities.”
During the Liberals’ last term, one of the government’s more controversial moves involved a decision to no longer fund adult upgrading courses and English-as-a-second-language courses at public post-secondary institutions. It was coupled with a decision to allow institutions to charge for the delivery of such courses.
While grants remain available to potential students earning an annual income of $24,144 or less, Ivanova argued the move most affected some of the underrepresented groups the government has claimed to prioritize.
“It’s very short-sighted that we’re not making this investment in basic education,” she said. •
