How to Build a Skills Lab: A New Model of Institutional Governance in Canada

Produced by the Mowat Centre at the School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Toronto.To better align the skills of Canada’s workers with the needs its of employers, significant shortcomings with respect to labour market information need to be overcome. To that end, the 2017 federal budget announced the creation of a “skills lab” to collect information about the skills needed in the labour market, explore new approaches to skills development, and share information about what types of program are the best bets for future investments in skills development. For the skills lab to succeed, however, provinces and territories – the primary policy actors in the field of skills training and development – must not simply be consulted; they must actively participate in designing, mandating and overseeing it from the outset. The skills lab should be seen not solely as an opportunity to operate as a laboratory for skills development and measurement, but as an experiment in the development of a more mature approach to federal-provincial institutional co-governance in Canada. A model of federal-provincial-territorial “co-ownership” of the skills lab would not only improve its chances for success, but could serve as an innovative, practical model for overcoming some of the recurring frictions that Canada’s federal system can create