Colleges Ontario

The vision:
To make Ontario the most accessible, most user-friendly jurisdiction in Canada for skills training and lifelong upgrading.

The reason Ontario must achieve this vision is clear. Ontario faces a serious skills shortage and skills mismatch in the years ahead, and this threatens the province’s long-term prosperity and standard of living. Ontario isn’t prepared for the pending retirement of many of its workers, or for the rapid technological changes affecting all businesses and industries.

In order to achieve the vision, the next Ontario government must adopt the following measures:

1) Increase postsecondary attainment rates to 75 per cent

To meet employers’ demands, greater numbers of people must receive postsecondary education and training. This is particularly true for under-represented groups such as aboriginals, francophones, and people in remote areas.

To achieve this target, college participation must increase by 30,000 over the next four years.

2) Significant increases in the retraining of the workforce

Ontario has fallen behind other jurisdictions in retraining and providing new skills training for its workforce. To address this, Ontario must:

• Commit to a 25 per cent in the number of employees receiving retraining or new training
• Provide financial incentives to business and trainers to promote retraining and new training
• Commit to strategies to address occupational shortages in areas such as health care.

3) Remove barriers for foreign-trained immigrants

More than 80,000 immigrants come to Ontario each year with postsecondary education and other training. However, most face significant barriers that limit their ability to enter the workforce at a level appropriate to their education and training.

Ontario must reduce the time it takes people to move from immigration to the workplace. To do this, the next government must adopt the following measures:

• Establish hubs of excellence at Ontario colleges to provide services to internationally trained individuals
• Develop common systems and approaches for recognizing credentials and providing access (when needed) to further training.

4) Make it easier for students to transfer between university and college

To ensure the best education and training outcomes for all students, Ontario must become a leader in Canada in providing for the transferability of credits among postsecondary institutions.

5) Marketing skills education

To enhance the public’s understanding of the career options available in Ontario, and thereby close the gap between available positions and workers’ skills, Ontario must invest in a multi-year marketing campaign.

6) Bring funding to Ontario colleges to national average

To produce the skilled workforce of tomorrow, Ontario must be committed to providing higher education and training to as many people as possible, including people in traditionally under-represented groups.

While funding to colleges has increased in recent years, the colleges are still struggling from years of cutbacks. Moving forward, colleges cannot provide the necessary levels of education, training and re-training required for people throughout the workforce at per-student funding levels that remain below both universities and high schools.

Ontario must make the following commitments to education and training:

• At a minimum, operating funding for Ontario colleges should be consistent with the Canadian average. Currently, the per-student funding for colleges is the lowest in the country. To bring Ontario to at least the average, operating funding to Ontario colleges must increase by $400 million over four years
• Significant investments must be made into capital repairs and improvements
• The federal funding announced for postsecondary education in the 2007 federal budget must be strictly dedicated to postsecondary education.