The ACTEW Blog

ACTEW contributed expertise to a Canadian delegation for the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women currently underway in New York City. The topic of this year's meeting is the economic success and the security of women.

Eight delegates were hosted by FAFIA and funded by Status of Women Canada to attend. They will return to their agencies across Canada to engage in community development projects inspired by UNCSW events.

As ACTEW's representative, Paula Wansbrough participated in the pre-sessional training seminar for the delegates on Feb. 23, speaking about national employment and training service trends for women as well as describing Ontario's LMDA implementation and its impact on women.

Other presenters at this training were:

• Lynell Anderson on the state of child care policy in Canada
  
• Andrée Côte on public services, parental leave and EI, and pay equity
  
• Michelè Asselin on women's economic security in Quebec
  
• Rhonda Roffey on violence against women in the Ontario context
  
• Louise Riendeau on violence against women in the Quebec context
  
• Muriel Smith on gender budgeting at the local and provincial levels in Manitoba
  
• Jessica Notwell on sustainable livelihoods

The NGO Consultation Day took place on Feb. 24 in which NGOs were reminded of their important duty to monitor government implementation of UN treaty agreements. Women's groups and environmentalists have been the strongest NGO voices in UN work. Key presentation topics and discussions included: Gender budgeting, gender equality architecture within the UN, financing women's empowerment, and education on violence against women.

During the weekend, ACTEW also connected with representatives of Canada's Status of Women, sharing LMDA implementation information as well as highlights on our upcoming release on the ten components of successful programming for women.

For more on the UNCSW, visit the UN website at:
http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/52sess.htm
To learn about the NGO Committee on the Status of Women, visit:
http://www.ngocsw.org/en/main
Watch FAFIA's website for outcomes of this year's UNCSW:
http://www.fafia-afai.org/

Thank you to FAFIA for arranging the delegation and coordinating the highly informative training day.

Labels: ACTEW_Activities, Issues_and_Trends, LMDA, Meetings_and_Events

On Friday (Feb 22, 2008), the governments of Canada and Ontario announced "a new agreement to help Ontario workers improve their skills and get better jobs."

Under the new agreement, the Government of Canada will invest nearly $1.2 billion in Ontario's labour market over the next six years. These funds will help individuals and workers who are not eligible for training under the Employment Insurance (EI) program to improve their skills. The funding will also help individuals too often excluded from the labour force, including Aboriginal people, immigrants, persons with disabilities, as well as those workers who lack literacy and essential skills, get the training they need to obtain meaningful and sustainable employment.

Note that this agreement replaces the previously signed 2005 Labour Market Partnership Agreement (LMPA), which was to contribute $300 million/year ongoing to Ontario's labour market development strategies. The new agreement is less money and signed for a finite amount of time (6 years). The money will focus on a few priority areas, including: technical skills training, labour market integration of immigrants, foundation skills and supports, and labour market supports for persons with disabilities.

The agreement comes into effect April 1, 2008, beginning with an investment of about $194 million in 2008-2009. Read full press release and backgrounder on the Government of Canada web site.

Labels: LMDA, LMPA, MTCU_Updates

Deanna Yerichuk attended the January 18 Employment Ontario Service Delivery Advisory Group meeting. Three key topics were covered:

New Federal Investments as Ontario negotiates a Labour Market Agreement
Kevin French, Assistant Deputy Minister of MTCU, is leading negotiations with the government of Canada to sign a Labour Market Agreement (LMA), which would transfer new funding Ontario for labour market training initiatives (read ACTEW’s blog of the 2007 federal budget announcement). The LMA is in fact replacing the Labour Market Partnership Agreement (LMPA), and two investment priorities have been earmarked for the money:
1) non-EI-eligible clients
2) low skill workers
It was confirmed at the meeting that these priorities mean that funding will be able to support Ontarians who do not currently qualify for EI, as well as Ontarians that are under-employed and/or precariously employed.

There was no mention of Ontario’s share of the $500 million annually promised across Canada, but they do expect the agreement in place for the money to start to flow in 2008/09 fiscal year.

Program Design Update
The External Service Delivery Reference Group on Program Design – Employment had an intensive planning session in January to determine guiding principles and provide feedback on the proposed employment services delivery model. Here are just a few of the key components of the new integrated system (targeted to be implemented in April 2009):

• There are three “components’ of the integrated employment services: Support for Independent Job Search, Employment Placement, Matching and Incentives, Job Maintenance, Sustainability and Advancement.


• Deliverers of service will determine which component, or combination of components will achieve the best results based on the individual’s needs, the local labour market environment and the program’s strategic goals/policy objectives.


• Employment service functions, intensities and incentives enable deliverers to tailor services to individual, employers and community circumstances and needs to achieve labour market attachment outcomes.


• Depending on community demographics, the services could include “specialization” of delivery and access – i.e. services targeted to immigrants, persons with disabilities, older workers, youth, and specialization of components such as placement and matching.


• Enables communities to augment components of services to reflect and respond to local circumstances and unique community demographics or economic situations. Based on the need, services may include some or all components of the employment service model, and may add unique components and features.


• EI status is no longer an eligibility requirement for access to employment services. However, there will have to be the capacity to record and track EI status to meet LMDA reporting requirements and to report expenditures against the appropriate account.

A revised document will be released at the end of January. ACTEW is planning a members’ meeting for mid-February to review these discussions in detail with our representative Honey Crossley (Working Skills Centre) who sits on this external stakeholder advisory group. ACTEW members will receive information about this session shortly.

Upcoming focus groups on Service Delivery Framework
MTCU has completed the Jurisdictional Review, and is fine-tuning a discussion paper on the current Service Delivery Framework. Coordinated by the Ontario Association of Youth Employment Centres (OAYEC), MTCU will be holding a series of focus groups and inviting written submissions at the end of February. ACTEW members will have an opportunity to attend these focus groups around the province. Stay tuned for more information.

Materials from the January 18 meeting will be placed on the Employment Ontario Partners’ Gateway web site: http://www.eopg.ca/eng/sdag.html
As always, if you have any questions, concerns or ideas, please contact Deanna at policy@actew.org.

Labels: LMDA, LMPA, Meetings_and_Events, MTCU_Updates

MTCU has posted all Service Delivery Advisory Group materials on the Employment Ontario Partners' Gateway web site at: http://www.eopg.ca/eng/sdag.html

These materials offer presentations and documents on key MTCU developments of Employment Ontario, such as Employment Programs Design,Service Delivery Framework and Standards Access Strategies Projects, and other updates and decisions.

One word of caution: documents are listed by SDAG meeting date, which means that older meetings may have materials that have since been changed or updated. If you have questions about the materials posted, contact Deanna at ACTEW at policy@actew.org.

Labels: LMDA, MTCU_Updates

Current labour market policies don't recognize women as a significant labour market force with specific patterns. A study released by the government of Canada in 2005 analyzes how Canadian fiscal policy reinforces the many social, economic and legal barriers women face when they try to gain equal access to full-time work with equal pay, and examines structural proposals that would remove or reduce these barriers to women's labour force participation. From the study:

“Five basic structural features of the tax and social assistance system are examined for their tendency to place pressure on women to “choose” unpaid or poorly paid irregular work to optimize the well-being of their families. These include provisions that treat the adult couple as the basic unit of fiscal policy, like the dependent spouse credit, joint income limits on the child tax benefit, and the Goods and Services Tax credit. They also include the tax exemption of unpaid work, the lack of adequate child care resources and the non-deductibility of the many costs that make women's paid work often less profitable than unpaid work, the steep clawback rates in social assistance programs and the relatively high rates of income taxes imposed on the lowest incomes.”

A recent study released from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) finds that, again due to specific labour patterns, most women are getting shut out of Employment Insurance (EI) coverage in Canada. Exclusion from EI also means exclusion from most of the training programs and supports offered through EI funding (Read ACTEW’s blog entry on this research). While individual training programs and supports run by agencies recognize women-specific labour patterns, needs and opportunities, provincial and federal labour market development policy has so far not systemically implemented strategies that would fully maximize women’s participation in the labour force. In fact, data collection segregated by gender is patchy at best, so provinces are hard-pressed to fully understand the ways in which half the labour force is being utilized and where improvements can be made.

Only one province in Canada has made significant progress in understanding and supporting women’s unique contexts to more fully participate in the workforce: Quebec. Quebec has introduced legislation that extends maternity and parental leave to self-employed workers—significantly affecting women who are outpacing men three-fold in becoming entrepreneurs. Quebec is also the only province to implement universal accessible child care, which the Quebec government identifies as a key reason that women’s participation rates have increased dramatically in the last ten years (read Le bulletin du Cetech released by the government of Quebec in Winter 2007).

Labels: Issues_and_Trends, LMDA, Resources_and_Research

On November 15, Deanna attended the MTCU Service Delivery Advisory Group meeting, which provided information on the changes to contract administrative processes, program and policy coherence, and the new service delivery model. We’ll review the most pressing item here, but will post presentations on all topics within the next few days.

Changes to Contract Administrative Processes
As MTCU engages in transforming the Ontario Employment Benefits and Support Measures (OESBM) (read about EBSMs in detail on this federal government web site) infrastructure, agreements are being extended and contract administration streamlined. OEBSM agreements can be extended for up to 18 months effective December 1, 2007, with two main requirements: (1) demonstrated need for the program and (2) no performance issues.

As of December 1, MTCU is also introducing two initiatives to ease external administrative requirements (note that these changes apply to all OESBM programs, not just those coming up for renewal):
1) Increased Budget Flexibility: the 10% cap will be removed, and while rationales are still needed for budget changes, approvals will be much quicker, based on principle of prior written approval. This should reduce the need for amendments.
2) Budget Negotiation: MTCU will be looking at history of expenditure patterns and will forecast a budget for service providers for new budgets. MTCU says this will allow for maximum use of funds across programs. Note that end-date extensions do not require a new proposal.
All service providers should receive a letter detailing these changes by early December, and will be contacted by local MTCU staff to discuss extensions and flexibilities.

Labels: LMDA, Meetings_and_Events, MTCU_Updates

On October 30 and 31, ACTEW had the pleasure of participating in the conference Putting Women in the Picture near Brantford¸ hosted by the Grand Erie Training and Adjustment Board (GETAB). The event brought nearly 60 service providers to discuss how women in the region could be served more effectively.

A panel discussion kicked off the event, highlighting the issues and barriers women in the region face, particularly newcomer women, women survivors of violence, women in the workforce and women’s self-esteem. Key points included:

• With no public transportation, and the high costs of owning and operating a vehicle, many women cannot physically access services or get to and from available jobs
• Parenting issues for women loom large—child care is hard to find in the region, and what is available is expensive and generally has inflexible hours.
• Young women often face discrimination in the workforce from employers who fear hiring them in case they get pregnant and interrupt productivity.
• Extremely marginalized women have no informal support networks and have no one to turn to if they need emergency child care.
• Newcomer women tend to be better educated than Canadian-born women, but have much lower earnings, on average. Immigrant women tend to work low-skill, low-pay jobs that are not related to the careers in which they are trained.
• Women affected by violence deal with other issues, and there appear to be increasing incidences of harassment in the workplace by a woman’s domestic partner. There have been three cases recently in the area of the woman losing her job because her abusive partner was harassing her at work.

The participants also heard an update on the development of Employment Ontario in a presentation by Sherree Mahood, MTCU’s Regional Director of the Western Region. We’ll give you a full report on this presentation in the next blog entry.

The remainder of the conference was facilitated by Facilitating Inclusion facilitators from St. Joseph Immigrant Women’s Centre (Hamilton) and led the participants through a planning process to move towards supporting the women of the region more fully.

We’d like to thank Betty Anne, Jill and Tracey for an excellent conference, and we look forward to working with key stakeholders to move towards the goals set out in the session.

Labels: ACTEW_Activities, LMDA, Meetings_and_Events, MTCU_Updates

The federal government has not provided any funding for the Labour Market Partnership Agreement (LMPA) but the federal budget tabled on Monday does allocate funds with a similar intention.

The Conservative government states it has earmarked:

$500 million annually starting in 2008–09 for a new approach to labour market training to help ensure that Canadians who need skills training will receive it. This provides a total of $3 billion more for training by 2013–14.

It's unclear whether this is to honour the LMPA or replace it. Will the money have similar allocations and target groups that include apprenticeships, integration of immigrants, literacy and essential skills, workplace skills development, assistance for Aboriginals, and assistance to
others facing labour market barriers? We also don't know how much of the $500 million will make its way to the province of Ontario. By comparison, the LMPA earmarked an investment of $300 million per year into Ontario. If we do hear any clarity on these questions, we'll pass them along to you.

Other relevant highlights of the 2007 Federal Budget include:

• Renegotiating LMDAs with other provinces to fully devolve all agreements (some provinces have "co-managed" agreements, meaning the the province and the federal government work together)

• the possibility of devolving other pan-Canadian employment and training programs, such as programming for youth, people with disabilities, and older workers.
  

Several groups have examined the federal budget overall to determine its impacts on Canadians.

In particular, FAFIA has released a document on the impacts of the Budget on Canadian women, stating that...

women in Canada are affected differently than men by tax and spending policies of governments as a result of their varying labour market opportunities, family and community responsibilities, and levels of economic security.

FAFIA's report provides an overview of the budget in regards to poverty measures, tax breaks, social programs, and values. Download the report from the FAFIA web site.

Labels: LMDA, LMPA

There’s been a comment posted, and I’ve had several other inquiries asking: what’s the difference between the LMDA and the LMPA?

There are a few critical differences:

• where the money’s coming from:
  
  The LMDA money comes from the EI account; the LMPA comes from the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF). Clients need to qualify for EI to access services funded through the LMDA, but there is no such requirement in the LMPA. Therefore, employment and training services offered through the LMPA can be a lot more flexible in accessibility requirements LMDA services.
  
  
• what’s being transferred:
  
  The LMDA is not simply a transfer of money. It actually transfers programs and services with their associated funding (to get technical, the LMDA transfers the Employment Benefits and Support Measures under Part II of the EI Act).
  
  In comparison, the LMPA is transfer of dollars, not programs. Some money will be invested in existing programs/organizations at federal/provincial level in Ontario, but there is also a commitment to create new programs/organizations (“instruments”) to address priority areas.
  
  
• who’s in charge:
  
  The LMPA will be jointly managed by the province and the federal government. The two governments will work together to determine priority spending areas, requirements, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation.
  
  The LMDA fully devolves responsibility and money from the federal government to the province. This doesn’t mean that the federal government is not involved: the federal government is working closely with the provincial government in implementation of the LMDA. Also, the federal government defined the LMDA parameters of the programs, eligibility and evaluation in the agreement, so the province is bound by terms set federally.
  
  
• whether the agreement will be honoured:
  
  The LMDA is well on its way to being implemented January 1, 2007.
  
  On the other hand, the federal government has not released any funds associated with the LMPA, and at this point, we are unsure whether the federal government plans to honour the agreement.
  

Still have questions? Disagree? Heard something different? Post a comment and let us know.

Labels: LMDA, LMPA

Jen Liptrot, ACTEW's ED, attended the LMDA Service Delivery Advisory Group meeting on September 6, 2006 and has the following updates to share:

The Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities (MTCU) is taking a slow and steady approach to the planning, which seems likely to result in a better, more inclusive process that builds stakeholder engagement.

MTCU is planning a preliminary series of consultations over the next couple months. Ideally one planning session will happen in each of their 4 regions (Central, Eastern, North and West), facilitated by the new MTCU Regional Directors. Preliminary thinking is that these could be "blended sessions" to include municipal service providers (OW), reps from other provincial ministries, community-based training and employment providers, colleges, employers/organized labour/education, and the literacy sector. The goals of the sessions will include soliciting feedback on future planning process, discussing business continuity, and initiating exchange of program information.

We’ll share information about the consultations as it becomes available.

Labels: LMDA, MTCU_Updates

A Labour Market Development Agreement (LMDA) is a contract that the federal government signs with individual provinces and territories. It assigns responsibility for the design and delivery of programs that train and help people find employment.

LMDA agreements were created in an effort to

• reduce duplication between federal and provincial employment services,


• improve client services, and


• meet the needs of local labour markets.

Ontario signed an LMDA in November of 2005, and was the last province to do so. The Canada-Ontario LMDA transfers responsibility for the design and delivery of programs and services to the Government of Ontario, beginning January 1, 2007.

A couple important things to know about the LMDA:

• The Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities is the provincial Ministry responsible for integrating these new programs and services.
  
  
• The total amount of funding that will be transferred to Ontario through the LMDA each fiscal year is approximately $525 million.
  
  
• The LMDA is a transfer of already existing programs and services to be integrated into Ontario’s present employment and training services programs
  
  
• The money comes from Canada’s Employment Insurance fund, which places restrictions on who can access these employment programs and services.

And that’s a very brief introduction to a very complicated policy shift happening here in Ontario.

Still confused? Post a question in the comments of this blog and we’ll be happy to investigate for you.

And please look at ACTEW’s two-page overview of the LMDA, available in English and French.

The agreement itself is available on the HRSDC web site: http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/en/epb/lmd/lmda/ontario/index.shtml

Labels: LMDA

ACTEW is focusing on two recently signed provincial/federal agreements:

• the Canada-Ontario Labour Market Development Agreement (LMDA), and
  
  
• the Canada-Ontario Labour Market Partnership Agreement (LMPA).

These agreements move the responsibility for most employment and training services from the federal government into the hands of the provincial government. Future blog entries will look at each agreement in greater detail.

These policies are going to significantly affect employment services and training in Ontario.

We think this change is an opportunity. As a provincial network, we can be pro-active. Together, we can put these policies to work for working women, and for all Ontarians.

So visit this blog...

• for the latest developments of the LMDA and LMPA implementation
  
  
• for opportunities to participate in policy dialogue, both online and in-person
  
  
• to participate in ACTEW’s research on the impacts of policy on training and employment service providers and their clients
  
  
• to get inspired by profiles of innovative community work that supports and encourages women’s economic self-sufficiency
  
  
• for comprehensive facts about women and employment, including newcomer women, sole-support parents, women with disabilities, and more
  
  
• to find resources and research about women’s employment and training needs

We look forward to strengthening our network with you!

Deanna

Labels: ACTEW_Activities, LMDA