INTRODUCTION

We are all agreed that education is the key to our ability to maintain our position in the international marketplace. What is unfortunate is that much of our workforce is presently attempting to train and update themselves at night on a part-time basis and with inadequate resources.

There are really three issues as we see them, and we will share the presentation of those issues. They are the provision of appropriate education, making education accessible to all learners, and accountability. There is an additional point we will address, which is the development of the national policy. on paid educational leave.

APPROPRIATE EDUCATION

It helps to begin by refreshing our memory on the learner population we are dealing with. Let us concentrate on the 1980s. First of all, we have the new entrants to the labour force: 2.6 million people expected to join the labour force this decade. Of that, two-thirds, or 1.7 million, will be women. On the other hand, you have the people already in the labour force who are currently trying to adapt to new work and new working environments created by micro technology. These two groups will be seeking adult education.

Within the group of people needing to adjust to technological change during their working lives, you can find essentially three identifiable groups. There are the two-thirds of working women concentrated in support-type occupations, working as clerical, sales or service workers - and as the government's own Labour Canada Task Force on Microelectronics reported last year, women are likely to bear the brunt of technological change because they are concentrated in these types of very vulnerable occupations which furthermore almost invariably lack opportunity for training and development.

The second group you can identify are middle managers. In Vancouver recently, we were told that MacMillan Bloedel is in the process of relocating into very much smaller premises than it used to have. It is not because everybody has been on Weight Watchers, but because they have laid off - as somebody put it to me - acres of middle managers during the recession. While right now they are hiring back loggers, they are not hiring back all these middle managers. That includes six women who finally made it into middle-management ranks a few years ago. And of course they are last in, first out. So the middle managers include men as much as they include women.

The third group includes factory and warehouse workers, skilled and relatively unskilled workers. Here we are talking about several minority groups: the older people, who were identified as a critical group in the parliamentary task force a couple of years ago, who have not finished their high school education and therefore are very much handicapped in their pursuit of continuing adult education and retraining. Then another group includes immigrant women. You find them in garment factories in Hamilton, Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg. They are again very much handicapped in their ability to get the additional training and education they need. There are francophone outside of Quebec. They are handicapped because of the lack of educational resource opportunities in their language.

Women just happen to be the major proportion of both the groups entering the labour force this decade, as well as needing to do that adjustment to and adaptation to technological change during their working lifetime.