A roundtable was held in Portage la Prairie to assist in ensuring federal workforce development funding transfers are flexible and responsive to the new labour markets. Education and Training Minister Ian Wishart elaborates.

Ian Wishart

"This is a labour market consultation. Any time you have people finding jobs or creating jobs, you have a relationship between the employer and the employee. A lot of that is about whether or not you're trained to do the job. That's where government gets involved. It gets involved in the training process."

He says lots of workers are needful, and many employees are required, which requires a balancing process the government's trying to bring about. Wishart says it's not always easy since many jobs must be created, but many employees are needed to to that. He adds they haven't looked at these agreements since 1997. Wishart says the workplace and job market have changed somewhat since then, noting we didn't have cell phones like we do today, for example.

Wishart explains it took this amount of time to deal with this because money mostly comes from federal government. An agreement was signed in 1997 to devolve it to the provinces. He notes they must have thought that was a permanent fix since no issue was made about since then. But he notes they're reviewing it now and seeking to modernize it. Wishart adds in order to accomplish this, they have to communicate with people on both sides of the equation. So, people who represented employees and employers were present.

He notes they've held meetings in the city as well as the rural areas, and the northern region, seeing as issues vary dramatically between areas.

He outlines some of what he heard in the discussions.

"We're hearing a lot of pretty good ideas in terms of specifics. Today, the theme would probably have been better communication both ways, which is a good message. It would suggest to me that we need to be looking at what I call a feedback loop, where we hear from them, they hear from us much more often than since 1997."

Wishart says one topic was raised that surprised him.

"One issue that was the biggest surprise today was when a person gets to a certain age, and has been in the industry for a while, but the company leaves town. . . what do you do? Especially for older people, it's tough to get back into the workplace and re-train."