Preface

It is difficult to explain how the Canadian labour-market training system is structured or operates. It isn’t a system in the conventional sense of the term. It doesn’t have components that all work together to achieve a clear goal—such as producing an adequate number of appropriately trained workers.

Rather, the training system is a political system, wherein groups of stakeholders—employers, workers, and governments—seek to advance their interests. Conflicts among stakeholders’ interests are resolved by stakeholders exercising whatever power they can muster to achieve their goals. The result is a fragmented and ever-shifting system that is riven with conflict and compromise. In this way, the training system operates similarly to the industrial-relations system. Broadly speaking, employers seek to maximize their profitability by externalizing training costs onto workers and the state and advocating for an oversupply of trained workers (in order to reduce wage levels). By contrast, workers want training that helps them maximize their wages and ability to find work. And the state seeks to manage conflict in a way that ensures both the production and social-reproduction processes tick along.

I’ve chosen to explain Canada’s labour-market training system through a political lens for two reasons. First, in providing a coherent explanatory framework, this approach helps readers understand both how the system operates and why it operates in that way. Seemingly inefficient or otherwise defective training structures and processes are the outcome of the interplay of interests and power, rather than otherwise inexplicable mistakes that are amenable to simple fixes.

Second, this approach is likely to make readers uncomfortable. The key audience for this book is undergraduate students. In my experience, presenting students with controversial arguments, for example, that employers misrepresent skills shortages or that governments collude with employers to the detriment of vulnerable Canadians, motivates them to critically evaluate the evidence presented (or marshal their own), improves understanding, and leads to a deeper knowledge of the subject (even if they disagree with the conclusions).

The risk of this approach is that other readers may be tempted to dismiss the analyses as a polemic or merely ideological. This book is polemical, in that it makes a controversial argument that refutes many common-sense views about labour-market training (e.g., that there are widespread skills shortages). And it is also ideological, in that it is premised upon an integrated set of assertions, theories, and beliefs (i.e., a loosely Marxist analysis of employment and education).

That does not, however, mean the arguments contained in the book are mistaken—although that is usually the rhetorical intent of calling something polemical or ideological. Rather, this approach is an effort to undertake an engaging and insightful analysis that helps us better appreciate how and why our training system operates as it does.

The evidence I’ve marshalled in support of the arguments relies heavily on peer-reviewed academic research and statistics generated by governments or international bodies. One of the challenges of writing a contrarian account is that an author often must fill in the gaps in the literature (which tends to echo the traditional views) through logic, argument, and inference as well as by using credible studies published by reputable think tanks. I’ve attempted to write my account with a consistency befitting a rigorous polemic, which aims to provide students with the facts about the Canadian training system, as seen within the space of political and social contestation.