To the Editor:
According to reports, the Prime Minister will rise in the House of Commons on Tuesday October 29th and present some details of a tentative economic agreement between Canada and the European Union.
The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is the most far-reaching economic agreement in Canadian history, and includes important provisions on mutual recognition of professional qualifications between Canada and the 28 nations in the EU. Its provisions on professional qualifications could have significant impact in Canada, as it has long struggled with the issue of foreign credential recognition.
The Europeans are far ahead of Canada in this regard, having in place a comprehensive European Skills and Competency framework that defines competency for virtually every occupation, and allows relatively simple credential portability and mobility throughout the EU.
In Canada, each province assesses and awards professional credentials individually, and while there has been movement on harmonizing standards, Canada still has no national qualifications system in place, let alone any means of recognizing portability of learning throughout a working life. In Canada, a career change often involves "returning to go", starting over at the most basic post-secondary levels and moving through subsequent levels of learning, rather than simply recognizing acquired skills and knowledge gained over a working life and then applying training and education to fill in the gaps.
In fact, recognizing acquired skills and knowledge can't even be accomplished in a Canadian province without a cumbersome and incomplete "prior learning assessment/recognition" (PLAR) process. In the EU, it is not only possible; it is part of the fabric of education and learning.
The ridiculousness of Canada's professional qualification and credentialing system was made glaringly evident when I did my last private pilot medical, which required me to have an electro-cardiogram. After we were finished, I asked the flight surgeon if they'd found anything. He smiled, and said he couldn't say, because we were in Alberta - but if we had been in Saskatchewan he could tell me that everything was fine. For the skilled trades, we have the interprovincial Red Seal program - but Nova Scotia refuses to recognize training and on-the-job time acquired in another province.
Huh? How is it that in Europe 28 sovereign nations can agree on common credentialing and qualification standards for 500 million people, but in Canada we can't figure this out for 13 provinces and territories representing only 35 million or so? It's ridiculous, and it needs to change.
When Canada signs off on CETA, there's a huge opportunity for opening trade in skills - but only if we get our act together. Since we don't currently have anything approaching a Canadian qualifications and competency framework, why not adopt the European model? It's already built, it is in place, and competency-based criteria for assessing the qualifications have already been established. Why re-invent the wheel?
The provinces, or course, will squawk, as they regularly do whenever an initiative is discussed that supposedly infringes on their jurisdiction (see Canada Job Grant), and therein lies the problem. It's time for the feds and the provinces to stop acting like school children and get it right. Otherwise, the benefits of professional recognition will accrue to the Europeans, and Canadians will be left out - not because we're less skilled or less qualified, but because parochial politics prevents us from having a mechanism for quantifying our skills.
CETA is coming, and we probably have a couple of years to get ready for the changes that this agreement will bring. Adopting the European skills and credentialing model seems like a no-brainer... and the clock is ticking.
Jeff Griffiths, Troy Media Corp.
