Paid Educational Leave

One of the measures which may in fact make educational resources more accessible to all learners is a national policy on paid educational leave. The federal government, through a task force of Canada Employment and Immigration, is considering a set of policy options at this moment for implementing a universal system of paid educational leave. I would just draw your attention to these two volumes of Learning a Living in Canada in case you are not familiar with them.

This system should be available to all Canadians, but it should focus on two major groups: first of all, the most educationally disadvantaged, and second, workers who have already lost their jobs through the introduction of high technology into the workplace. Most of the people in those two groups are women.

This is an extremely important policy thrust for this country. It has the potential to deal constructively with the serious adult illiteracy problem which we have in Canada and at the same time facilitate the maintenance of state of the art skills in our workforce. CCLOW, among many other organizations from the education sector, from business and industry, labour and even governments, is strongly supporting the establishment of a universal system of paid educational leave which would achieve the objectives we have mentioned.

Our major concern at this point with this policy development is that it focus on those who are most in need of such a plan, rather than, for example, as the National Training Act has done, on the already highly skilled in the labour force. We are very concerned about the vast numbers of women who are losing their jobs through the automation of offices and what not and yet are not being given the training education opportunities that they need to retrain and re-enter the workforce. That applies to vast numbers of workers; and it is our concern that a system of paid educational leave would be designed in such a way to focus and most advantage, if you like, those groups of people.

We have some concerns that if it is to be paid for exclusively by employers, it would therefore exclude people who are already out of the labour force, either through job displacement or because they have not been able to get in the first place.