Commission on the Reform of Ontario's Public Services

Comprehensive Reform in Federal-Provincial Arrangements
The patchwork of federal-provincial labour-market agreements that targets various groups of
clients not only creates challenges for Ontario’s “one-stop shop” vision of employment and
training service delivery, but also leads to fragmented and distorted policy-making, based on
federal notions of labour-market priorities as opposed to responsiveness to local conditions.
The differing program and client eligibility requirements contained in these agreements
limit Ontario’s ability to maximize the benefits from providing an integrated suite of labourmarket
programs and services. For example, under the LMDA, Ontario can only fund
programs and services that are “similar” to those originally designed and delivered by the
federal government in the early 1990s. This unnecessarily restricts Ontario’s capacity to meet
its fluid labour-market requirements.
Ontario received only 31 per cent of the funding allocation for EI training in 2010 although
Ontarians accounted for 42 per cent of Canada’s unemployed population. This shortfall
restricts access to training and employment supports because most of these initiatives are
available only to active and former EI recipients. Removing the EI eligibility condition from
LMDA programs would enable Ontario to fund programs most relevant to its current labourmarket
challenges.
The Strategic Training and Transition Fund (STTF) provided an additional $207 million over
two years for programming to support both unemployed and employed individuals affected
by the economic downturn regardless of their EI eligibility. The STTF allowed Ontario to
introduce innovative approaches to target those who need it most before it expired at the
end of March 2011, exemplifying the benefits of having flexibility in program design and scope.
There are also federally funded and delivered employment and training programs for youth,
persons with disabilities and Aboriginals who are not part of existing bilateral agreements:
� The federal Youth Employment Strategy (YES) offers a range of programming for youth
aged 15 to 30; and
� The federal Opportunities Fund for Persons with Disabilities provides funding to
organizations that help people prepare for, find and maintain employment.
This arrangement creates administrative inefficiencies, complexity for stakeholders and
service providers, and confusion for potential clients.
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