Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - October 28, 1981, Winnipeg, Manitoba Winnipeg free october Warren Allmand report is directed at Lloyd Canadas Lack of skilled workers it is ironic that 15 years after the creation of the department of Man Power and and despite some of its successful the manpower problems it was created to solve still there Are still shortages of skilled manpower and the level of unemployment is now much higher than it was in the mid 1960s parliamentary task Force on employment opportunities for the 1980s Ottawa curiously de spite this now widely shared de Bate Over Canadas manpower policies has Only recently emerged from a its revival came As would be employers suddenly found that the Immi Grant flow on which they had always relied for skilled workers had dried up and a fact repeatedly stressed in the report of the parliamentary task Force theother Day Canada began to confront the Side beside conundrums of High unemployment and severe Man Power shortages in some critical skills the now being is not just a waste of human it has left Canadian Industry hard pressed to exploit its own Market opportunities or Ottawa politicians Are being told these Days at every available Opportunity to hold its own on the increasingly competitive world Industrial program deficiencies the Long period of inattention is hard to account considering the rampant deficiencies in the opera Tion of Canadas manpower programs turned up in two government instigated task Force one a report describing itself As reflecting the concerns of grassroots Canada was issued in mid october by the All party task Force of under the chairmanship of Warren the an internal was carried out for employment minister Lloyd Axworthy and released last there is an impressive unanimity in the two study groups most both propose that Canada move into a new phase in its training and treatment of highly skilled Blu Collar both Call on Industry to pull up its and Start giving workers the intensive on the Job training they so urgently both Call for recognition that such training is a form of pos secondary education and should be eligible for Public like All other forms of pos secondary reflecting a widespread pub Lic Call for an intensive intelligence Effort to produce forecasts of manpower on which lon term Joan Cohen Ottawa editor and medium term planning can be both offer a no familiar Call for a Federal provincial Council of ministers to set policies related to National Man Power and training needs echoing the Trudeau government to be pressed in the Federal provincial fiscal negotiations next for a Council of ministers to Deal with Post secondary education both task forces would arouse the Canada employment and immigration commission from its cur rent dramatic decline both reports for offer statistics showing a dramatic decline in role played by Canada employ ment centres in Job placements Over the past two in while the labor Force has the num Ber of Job placements last year remained Little in As the governments own study placement officers have been buried in red spending two thirds of their time filling out forms and maintaining in their attention has been diverted with much time spent processing would be workers for enrolment in training a Centrepiece of these employment and immigration commission offer Ings has been training seats Pur chased from the provinces under the adult occupational training these programs in turn come in for a damning critique for one As the maps they come wrapped in a made Nottawa at Best they reflect the needs of the Central Canada the offerings Are too Short term to provide the Quality of skills needed in the too workers come out of the pro Grams with Low level skills that Are already in surplus on a third commission the design and financing of Job creation the internal study offers the strongest critique by both studies note that the programs have been designed to offer Only Short term with participants then left to fall Back More focus on Page 8 on unemployment insurance or other social the internal report suggests the government is achieving Little with its programs because it has failed to define what it wants to achieve for example to offer Short term Relief to areas suffering from sudden Job loss and seed Money to build new Job skills or to launch Long term work opportunities in areas where unemployment is whatever these assorted critiques May suggest about government wast they leave Large doubts about the departments capacity to meet the and Likely rapidly changing manpower demands of the both studies acknowledge that they do not know what these demands will they Are As the All Mand committee by the Lack of a Well articulated Industrial strategy that would attempt to suggest what lies Down the Road for Canadian they Are also Hurt by an incredible absence of data on the current labor and How it the two reports readily of that at the professional engineers and scientists will be in Short to a greater or lesser management they also agree that some of the most critical shortages of the 1980s will come in the Blu Collar and that an intensive apprenticeship training covering a wide Range of skills and alternating both ont Ejob and institutional training will be necessary to meet swelling labor demands in both the manufacturing and construction has been reluctant to offer such it is particularly for apprentices in their starting and at the end of the training period companies lose High proportions of their workers to firms that do not bother to recognizing the seven maps of the parliamentary task Force looked Long and hard for a Carrot stick method to break the in the in one of their few areas of they split off in three perhaps largely by Accident along party the Fourman Liber Al majority borrowed an idea from and called for adoption of a payroll tax amounting to possibly per cent of total payroll to be paid by Canadian those industries offering training programs would sub tract their costs from the tax and thus recoup their they would obtain an extra 50 per cent tax Deduc Tion for spending above the per cent but the governments own study offered a More sophisticated one that it reports is rapidly taking rooting Many parts of the in this workers would receive intensive Basic skills at Public prior to launching their apprenticeship Peri countries such As great Britain and Australia have found that the Advance training has lopped two years from Industry Point of View the most costly years off a five year apprenticeship the government report says that the organization for economic cooperation and development has identified this approach As one of the major developments in training skilled work reflecting a worldwide trend to shift initial training away from the Plant and to place some of the Cost Burden on the Public the maps task Force and the government study group not Surpris part company on one other critic Cancun message be practical Cal the maps insist that no cuts be made in Federal assistance for posts Condary warning that any drop in support would involve taking a great risk with Canadas economic and Industrial the maps that efforts be made to redi rect some University spending into faculties where skill shortages the employment and immigration commissions own internal study takes a different proposing that some funds now assigned to universities be redirected to meet Blue Collar training costs and suggesting a popular idea at the official level these Days that some of the funds lost to the campuses be made up from higher student the using admittedly thin data about die world of the sees a surplus of University trained workers building in the decade resulting largely from diminishing demand for teachers and medical in a proposal destined to shake campuses from John to Victoria it proposes that Canada Content itself with a somewhat smaller manpower contribution from our institutes of higher Miami for delegates who wanted Rosy the Cancun Summit conference on development was a great Success because the United states accepted a Distant pledge of global for it was a disappointment because no specific approach and no deadline was either the nebulous idea of some kind of Universal where everyone would be asked to Settle everything Between Industrial and developing was offered As a test of global negotiations is the code for All kinds of concessions from Richer to poorer the phrase has be come a yardstick simply because there is no Concrete measure for so vast a notion As a new world economic order supposed to result from some Gigantic so yes or no to global negotiations is supposed to identify the White hats from the Black of it does not mean As Britain Margaret Thatcher said with her powdered in it would not Cost the United states a or feed a single if everyone agreed on attempting the Clear impossibility of settling anything that refusal to indulge in that particular kind of empty rhetoric merits no Brownie president Reagan offered his own Horatio Alger formula for poor countries to pull themselves up by their Bootstraps Flora Lewis through the magic of the Market and India Indira Gandhi noted dryly that hundreds of millions have no boots to in the unites states shies away from global negotiations because they have come to imply Windy debates in the United nations where we Are made the Scapegoat for the worlds As Well As More unt Ype votes pro claiming the Virtues of the you cannot vote Well being into though you can Toast to health and Prosperity for that makes politicians look better for a Little and it even makes people feel a bit better because it seems to recognize they have As much right As anyone to a decent life and Are not preordained to misery by some immutable natural the main achievement of was what did not leaders of 22 countries managed to identify tangible global problems with out just exchanging that is a key first the essential aim the meeting was to shift the focus of North South arguments from slogans to slogans have got in the Way of dealing with harsh the facts Are that the world is producing people faster than it is producing goods to meet their Basic needs the political system of Sovereign states and modern communications Are producing demands for a better distribution of what there is and knowledge that More could be done is producing an angry rejection of age old assumptions that the pestilence of poverty can Only be but if More and better Why is it not forthcoming the tempt too easily is to say that is because the Rich Are too selfish to Reagan is right in answering that distributing shortages does not in crease producing the leaders of the third world Are right in saying Good intentions fill no bellies that takes has really come to move to the substance of the North South prob not Only because it is immoral and unjust for people to suffer More than is but also because world peace will depend on demonstrating that the possible is being tackling substance and doing the possible in the Complex but feasible world of production and Trade is harder than slogans make it for coun tries that have developed the it May Only be a matter of will to provide new techniques in the Money and brains that but never in sufficient for countries that Only glimpse possibility from the prob Lem goes much it is a matter of identity and they Are really facing the question though Seldom admitted of whether the same Levels of material satisfaction Are possible for Are modernization and Well being synonymous with westernization if these countries Are doomed to be losers because they will never be As Western As the nobody has put the dilemma More honestly and More poignantly than the Anglo Indian writer who has shown that brilliance and inspiration Are no the monopoly of any when painful Candor replaces resentment and the sloth of today world also shows that there is no monopoly on the capacity for Man organization and have the japanese become honorary westerners or have they modernized within their own culture after the West needs to move on and do what it knows it can without but the rest of the world needs even More to get on and be without new York times new York times will announcements alone fool the voters beware of campaigning what you see and read May be an the tories biggest problem in the election Campaign is to Blunt the image of economic stagnation which has dog aged them throughout their years in those years saw Manitoba Economy performing tenth out of 10 on All major economic indicators in both 1979 and record out migration and a series of major Plant to counter this depressing the tories have apparently devised an election strategy of staged economic development announcements which they Hope will capture enough head lines to make voters Hope for the even if they remember the the first of these announcements involved the proposed Western Power Premier Sterling Lyon and Energy minister Don Craik held a news conference last week to unveil what not that the Energy ministers of the three Prairie provinces had agreed to a draft interim proposal to submit to their respective while it certainly represented Progress in the lon sought Power it was hardly not Only did the govern ments involved have to review the proposal and make a but required environmental Impact studies could take years Frances Russell the Manitoba govern ments hyped staging of the announce ment gave the immediate As it was designed to that some thing much More substantial had of most of the press was caught of guard Long enough that the govern ment enjoyed almost an entire Day of favourable so favourable was that in that the other two governments thought Manitoba had announced something that had not yet been agreed upon and promptly rained on Manito Bas Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed pointed out that All that had been achieved was a draft interim agree ment by ministers for presentation to their he had been accomplished before the election writs were issued in Mani Saskatchewan Allan Blakeney also had the impression that Manitoba was announcing a Deal that was he said no interim agreement has yet been reached by the three provincial governments and no such agreement is possible until the governments have had a full Opportunity to review the work of the ministers and officials to that comment seemed to Challenge Lyons press conference Confidence that he had received permission from the other two premiers to Mak his it certainly challenged the Manitoba premiers claim that the decisions would All be made within a matter of if the tories have ended up with a bit of egg on their they can Hope that most people do not bother to Analyse political announcements that a big or the Lead item on a is All that Many people re member not the followup questions and caveats that come a Day the Manitoba Premier cast himself in the role of an International Nickel company of Canada executive to hold another news conference in the legislative buildings to announce the company decision to open a new million mine in the company made its own announce ment in Thompson and it is not unusual for a particularly a campaigning to insert himself into any economic development or Industrial expansion action that comes but the government of the Day restricts itself to a supporting appearing on the platform along with the company Lyon was All alone in Winni a fact some Napers gleefully noted would remove whatever distinction there might have been in voters minds Between the tories and the provinces major but Lyons Solo performance on the new mine was not All that was unusual about the Inco announce the details revealed that the company proposed open pit operation in Only a replacement for another open pit mine that is expected to run out of Ore in not Only but the announcement was not really last Inco doonesbury division president Bill Clement fore cast the decision in his annual report to Manitoba Inco employees and the City of in that Clement said the company would have to decide by the end of september How it would replace the depleting open pit Clem ent reported that the company had narrowed the options to two reactivating the Birch tree mine or developing a new open pit Clement said he personally favored the new open pit which would be capita intensive at the Start but would have a lower Cost of production Over the Long the Birch tree option would involve a Shaft sinking program to double the depth of the mine to this Shaft development was under Way but was halted when the mine was closed during the 1978 production Ken incas superintendent of Public said the provincial government had had nothing to do with the decision i doubt they were even aware of Cherney said that As a Inco always gives Advance information to concerned governments about its corporate and in this told the mayor of Thompson and the provincial will Manitoba voters remember the headlines if this pattern of now you see now you do not Mega announcements will they just become More cynical m Thi Wholf might have turned who both our famius5ifthe wa5 she ;