Trades Training Centre – Putting the Cart Before the Horse?
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 @ 3:45 AM
By Peter Ewart
How is the skilled labour shortage to be addressed in Prince George, as well as the broader northern region by a new provincial government?
Should training plans or projects be based on sober investigation and assessment, and the broad public interest? Or should they be based on whether a proponent has donated to your political party or is someone your government wants to curry favour with? These questions need to be asked in regards to the proposed Rustad Trades Training Centre, as the proponents of this project have donated funds to both the BC Liberals and the BC NDP.
As it stands now, Canfor Corporation and the BID Group are requesting $10 million from the province to go ahead with the Rustad project. Both the Liberals and NDP have been considering the proposal, although more recently the Liberals, despite early interest, now appear to have cooled on the idea but have not entirely ruled it out.
Not a few people in this region have justifiable concerns about all of this and have expressed these in website postings and other venues. Projects that receive public funding should be subject to a process that begins with investigation, and in the case of training or addiction services, for example, be part of an overall plan for the city and/or region. Only then should specific locations, properties and proponents be selected.
Too often, the process appears to be backwards – the cart is put before the horse. A particular piece of property or a proponent is put first, rather than the selection of a particular property or proponent being one of the last stages of the process. The result is often controversy or fiasco.
Take for example, the proposed women’s addiction recovery centre in the Haldi Road neighborhood. A serious assessment of need and location does not appear to have been carried out, given the drastic revisions in fees (now pegged at $6,500 a month), changes in potential clientele and operations, and so on, that have taken place since the project was first announced.
The controversial Wood Innovation and Design Centre is another example. How much influence did property owners and property developers have in situating the WIDC downtown, rather than in a more logical location such as on or near the UNBC site on Cranbrook Hill? In any case, we are all witness to the tangled mess that has developed out of the property issue being put at centre stage. It is doubtful anything like this would have happened if the property issue / downtown development had not been given priority over the reason-to-be of the Centre, i.e. wood innovation and design, and associated research, education and collaboration.
Even the Baldy Hughes addiction recovery centre, once championed by Liberal insider Lorne Mayencourt to be self-sustaining, has suffered similar problems, in that the centre does not appear to have been based on a serious needs assessment, which was one of the factors leading to the centre descending into serious financial trouble and its operations taken over by the provincial government recently at a cost of millions of dollars. Just how wildly out of whack the planning was, we can see in the initial enrollment projections, i.e. proponents claimed that there would be 200 clients living in the facility by 2009 and 500 clients by 2010. Yet, the actual number of clients has been far less, hovering around 50 or so.
Which brings us back to the proposed Rustad trades training centre. Before signing on to provide support for the Centre or, for that matter, any other training project in the city or region, the new government (whether NDP or Liberal), should base its decision on the following:
(1) A review of existing training and education infrastructure and programs (including CNC, UNBC, other northern colleges, School Districts, company initiatives, labour union initiatives, and private trainers) and identify capacity, as well as obstacles to fulfilling that capacity.
(2) A plan based on actual labour market analysis and training needs in industry and the community, which could include expansion of existing programs or construction of new facilities if needed.
In regard to bricks and mortar, public dollars should, as first priority, be spent on public institutions for the public good. In the meantime, there is nothing to stop Canfor and BID from developing their own private training facility at the Rustad site if they so desire. But with their own funds for construction, operation and environmental cleanup.
Surely, rather than plunging blindly ahead into a new project, the first step in addressing the skills shortage in the region is having an overall plan based on labour market analysis. Any proposed project should be embedded within that overall plan, and, in turn, have its own individual business plan to justify it. Then informed decisions and choices can be made.
Not to do so, could well mean ending up with a boondoggle, white elephant, or something half-baked. And we’ve certainly had enough of that lately in this region with the BC Liberal government. But, lest we forget, it also happened in the 1990s under the NDP.
People, quite rightly, are demanding better ways of doing things. Whichever government is elected on May 14th should take note.
Peter Ewart is a columnist and writer based in Prince George, British Columbia. He can be reached at: peter.ewart@shaw.ca
Comments
“In regard to bricks and mortar, public dollars should, as first priority, be spent on public institutions for the public good. In the meantime, there is nothing to stop Canfor and BID from developing their own private training facility at the Rustad site if they so desire. But with their own funds for construction, operation and environmental cleanup”
I agree completely.
Right on Peter Ewart!
Methinks, the City is every bit the culprit that the Province is.
Well said. The horse before the cart logic that politicians often forget.
I agree this is about giving the province the clean up costs for the site and getting recognition for being good corporate citizens with the money they would have had to spend anyways to reclaim the land. Exactly like what Commonwealth planned with the PG Hotel land reclamation.
So I guess the horse and cart all comes down to perspective….
How is the Bid Group involved in this project. would they own part or all of the property that they are planing to flip to the government?
Cheers
Yep Canfor needs workers, let the taxpayer pay for it. Real upstanding.
Another greasy deal in the making and how is it that Marshall Smith is always somehow connected.
You contribute 50,000$ to this party and to the opposition party and your 100,000$ investment brings you a profit of more than 3000,000$ in 4 years by flipping a land for a university or training center in PG. What is the rate of return and what is the level of risk?
You can hardly get 20% annual return even in stock market and you can only get these rates of returns in a “Banana republiC”. I.e. B…..C.
Peter raises a good point:
“there is nothing to stop Canfor and BID from developing their own private training facility at the Rustad site if they so desire. But with their own funds for construction, operation and environmental cleanup.”
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similar to a private K-12 school (i.e.Cedars, St Mary’s, …) where the school sponsor group has to pay for their own land, buildings, staff, etc., meet provincial education standards and then received a prorated, reduced grant for actual student outcomes.
This whole building is completely pointless. Trades training is not the problems, the kids getting apprenticeships and jobs after getting their training is the problem. The current trades program is pumping out kids in huge numbers but their are only so many companies and projects for them to work at.Canfor does not have apprenticeships in pretty much all of their sawmills and will not hire young inexperienced workers to train. I’m not sure what the angle is for either of these companies because this project won’t benefit either of them.
Some good points made.
There is a curious smell to project….
You have it right superdave.
Germany, and now Australia after their revamping of their system 2 years ago, as well as many other countries provide subsidies to apprentices to give them a top up of apprenticeship wages and some, including Germany, have enacted laws which require companies to train on the job.
It is interesting that although Australia is also a federation such as Canada, that the federal government is able to implement such an attempt at improving the system.
I understand that the feds here are now considering doing something about it as well.
In both Australia and Canada, only about 50% of those who enter the trades training system complete the program during the last decade or so.
Before building more capacity for the didactic part of education/training, we need to do something about the Canfor’s of this province and country to come back into the joint government-industry training system that is supposed to be working but has, for some unknown reason, stopped working.
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BTW, the last part of the headline reminds me of the time people felt we put the “CART before the horse” in PG. ;-)
I wonder how many others recall that sentiment and article title some 30 or so years ago.
I have written this before, but the way forward is for the industry and academia in PG to create “cooperative programs” instead of creating more buildings. Here is one from BCIT:
http://www.bcit.ca/study/programs/2535dipts
in which the students spend part of the year in classroom and part of the year on the job. Having a job also motivates the students to finish their studies and it helps the retention of the students. This applied model is very suitable for CNC.
Concerning proposals for UNBC, I have a feeling that the management there is not open to new ideas …. . Prove me wrong.
Ummmm univ isn’t that what we call an apprenticeship? Go to school, work, go to school, work…., This isn’t new. We don’t need new programs we need industry to sponsor apprentices. But they don’t want to. Industry wants fully trained workers.
Kids are getting trained but we need someone to hire them! One of the problems with training someone is as soon as they are trained they leave for greener pastures. So less and less are willing to make the four year commitment.
In order for BCITs model to work someone needs to hire them!
Building another school won’t help the problem.
In the meantime, DBIA continues to water
the flowers.
Many industries are simply no longer profitable enough to fund on the job training for apprentices. It has become a luxury they can’t afford. And governments haven’t made that any easier with the way they are seeking to milk those businesses for every dollar they can exact for the slightest infraction of rules that are often virtually impossible for most businesses to be in full compliance with, let alone even keep abreast of. We have entered an age of bureaucratic lawlessness, where those charged with administering things which often seem like sensible ideas are left to ‘bring home the bacon’, and add to government revenues. Or they’ll be out of a job themselves. For many of us in business, small and medium sized businesses, it often now seems even crazy to want to do anything in BC. More and more of us have to ask ourselves just what is the point? The costs keep rising, the returns continually shrinking. Many of us, I’m sure, only keep going because we feel a loyalty to our long-term employees and customers, and if we quit, well, there’s just nothing else to do. Til this issue is dealt with, and there’s a chance again that we can ‘do things right’ and still make a dollar, I don’t see there being any great opportunities for training the next generation in the skills they’re going to need.
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