CONTENTS
Monday 26 September 1994
Ontario Council of Regents for Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology /
Conseil ontarien des affaires collégiales
Richard Johnston, chair
Wesley Romulus, chair, prior learning assessment advisory and coordinating group
Jim Turk, chair, governance committee
Diane Dubois, chair, French-language subcommittee / présidente du sous-comité de langue française
Ted Hargreaves, chair, committee on human resources
STANDING COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
*Chair / Présidente: Marland, Margaret (Mississauga South/-Sud PC)
Vice-Chair / Vice-Président: McLean, Allan K. (Simcoe East/-Est PC)
*Bradley, James J. (St Catharines L)
*Carter, Jenny (Peterborough ND)
*Cleary, John C. (Cornwall L)
Curling, Alvin (Scarborough North/-Nord L)
Ferguson, Will, (Kitchener ND)
Frankford, Robert (Scarborough East/-Est ND)
*Harrington, Margaret H. (Niagara Falls ND)
*Malkowski, Gary (York East/-Est ND)
*Waters, Daniel (Muskoka-Georgian Bay/Muskoka-Baie-Georgienne ND)
Witmer, Elizabeth (Waterloo North/-Nord PC)
*In attendance / présents
Substitutions present/ Membres remplaçants présents:
Cunningham, Dianne (London North/-Nord PC) for Mr McLean
Martin, Tony (Sault Ste Marie ND) for Mr Ferguson
McGuinty, Dalton (Ottawa South/-Sud L) for Mr Curling
Runciman, Robert W. (Leeds-Grenville PC) for for Mrs Witmer
Sutherland, Kimble (Oxford ND) for Mr Frankford
Clerk / Greffière: Mellor, Lynn
Staff / Personnel: Pond, David, research officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1402 in room 151.
ONTARIO COUNCIL OF REGENTS FOR COLLEGES OF APPLIED ARTS AND TECHNOLOGY CONSEIL ONTARIEN DES AFFAIRES COLLÉGIALES
The Chair (Mrs Margaret Marland): This week we are reviewing the government agency by the name of the Ontario Council of Regents for Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology. The first deputation this afternoon is Mr Richard Johnston, if you'd like to please come forward. I understand, Mr Johnston, that you have some other people with you. Welcome to the committee.
Mr Richard Johnston: Thank you, Madam Chairman. It's nice to see you.
The Chair: Well, it's very nice to see you. I was recalling the days when we sat together on the important side of the House.
Mr Johnston: The only side I ever knew.
The Chair: I would just say at the outset that the committee had agreed that your deputation would be one hour, followed by a second hour equally split in 20-minute portions in rotation by each caucus. So would you like to begin and perhaps introduce the people with you.
Mr Johnston: Let me start by thanking you for the time to meet with you. I've brought several members of the council with me: Ted Hargreaves, Jim Turk, Diane Dubois and Wesley Romulus. A couple of other members, I've noticed, have come in as well today, but they all obviously can't be here. We left you biographies of them all inside your packages so you'll get an idea of who are the 18 members of the Council of Regents at this time.
We actually wanted to use about a half-hour or so of time, not to take the whole time reading the document but just to highlight it and for you to read along as you go, and then to leave you more time for questions. We thought that might be a more useful use of your time, but we leave that up to you in terms of how much time you'd really like to take.
The Chair: That would be excellent. It's your option. I'm sure the committee would appreciate having more time for questions.
Mr Johnston: So if we can take maybe half an hour, and if you'd leave me a couple of minutes at the end, something like that, after we're finished questions in case there are a couple of other things that we felt we should have noted but didn't in the rush to get through, that would be great.
I guess what I'd like to do by starting off is to say that we're really pleased to be here and to be invited before the committee to talk about what the Council of Regents has been doing as part of a fairly significant reform of the community college system, the first major reform, I guess, in about 25 years, although there have been some things over time that have changed as part of an evolution. But we're right now in very much a rebirth of the system in a lot of ways.
Last year we came before another standing committee, in February, the finance committee, and for the first time actually made a presentation on behalf of the colleges with every stakeholder at the table: the students, the administrators, the unions, all the members of our group, as well as the council of governors and the council of presidents who had joined me at the two previous calls of the Council of Regents to appear before that committee. We did so because we thought it was time, one, to celebrate the colleges and what they had accomplished and, two, to also raise some flags of concern in terms of the pressures upon us.
As you know, the demands are enormous at this stage, and this year our population is going to increase again, probably by another 4%. In the last four years, it's gone up 35% at the same time as our money has dropped by 25%. So we have accomplished an enormous amount in terms of access at the same time as having less money to do it with. And we've undertaken reforms coming out of Vision 2000, which as you know began during the last government, and have taken those on at probably the most difficult time one could imagine doing so. We think in fact that the colleges have worked remarkably well together, although the normal tensions and stresses that are there between the central and local authority and other kinds of issues have obviously continued.
The Council of Regents, just to be clear to you, is in fact the body to which the minister has delegated certain authorities and, under the act, is one of two entities that are identified other than the ministry itself. Those are the boards of governors of each individual institution, who are the employers in each institution, and the Council of Regents, which represents the minister in a variety of ways. But ultimately, frankly, the minister is responsible.
It is a major difference between our system and the system of universities, where the medieval traditions, if I could put it that way -- not being pejorative, just historical -- of autonomy are sacrosanct; whereas right from the beginning when Bill Davis announced our system -- for which I, even publicly these days, give him full credit for being the best thing he ever did -- he noted that this was a public policy forum as well as a response to local community needs. That role, that tension has been there right from the very beginning between the council and the boards etc.
We are responsible as employers' agent for collective bargaining, and we'll take you through some of that. We appoint the governors, this being the option chosen by the government of the day, rather than having them elected or rather than having them appointed directly by the ministry itself, and have done so for the last 27 years essentially.
Under our authorities, we also are supposed to be principal advisers to the minister on all matters to do with the colleges, and then we are assigned such duties as the minister of the day, under his powers under the ministry act, may determine to be things he wishes the council to do because of its particular role. I would say that at the moment we are probably what you might call a hyperactive agency, doing an awful lot more than many of us expected to do when we came on, and the board members all play a very active role at the council in terms of decentralizing of our own authorities.
As you know, out of Vision 2000 a number of reforms were suggested, and in the 1991 budget the government decided to move on three of them.
The first was looking at a standards council to deal with standards across the system, because colleges essentially set their own program standards at this point and there was a feeling that there needed to be a better transferability of skills.
We will not talk much about the College Standards and Accreditation Council, CSAC, today, which is the council, but rather allow them to speak for themselves when they appear before you on Wednesday. But if you have questions of us we'd be happy to respond to them in terms of their relationship to the Council of Regents.
The second initiative was prior learning assessment, which was, I think, in part a reaction to the reality of the huge number of adults who were coming into our system and needed some credit for the learning they'd received, as well as trying to make it a fairer system of doing so than the ad hoc arrangements we had prior to that.
Then there is the connection between ourselves and the universities, something which had been basically disallowed -- let me put it that way -- in the setting up of the system in the 1960s, and now there's a real desire to deal with advanced training issues in some fashion or other.
Since that time we've also taken up a fourth initiative, which is the schools-college initiative, the relationship between high schools and colleges, and Diane has been member on that council.
I wanted to basically just indicate to you that the people here present are going to talk about the areas of expertise they have and take each as it comes. The order we've decided to go in is the order in your binder, and we want to start off with prior learning assessment because it is one of the three big reforms that has been moved by the government from the Vision 2000 document that was started in the late 1980s and came out in 1990. So Wesley Romulus will take you through that section of our presentation.
Mr Wesley Romulus: Prior learning assessment is the evaluation of non-college learning for college credit. Essentially, it's based on the premise that valuable college-level learning can be acquired outside of formal academic institutions and can be assessed for equivalency to learning acquired within those institutions. Through prior learning assessment, adult learners can be awarded credit for those parts of college programs for which they already have the necessary learning.
PLA, short for prior learning assessment, has many benefits. It improves access to college education and training; it helps eliminate duplication of learning and reduces the cost of college education; it facilitates personal growth for the learner; and it promotes respect for adult learners as full participants in the lifelong learning process.
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In a time of significant economic restructuring that we're living in in Ontario today, PLA is making a significant contribution to Ontario's efforts to promote access and equity in our public institutions, as well as to the province's capacity to adapt to workplace demands and our society's changing demographics.
The PLA initiative started way back in 1989 when the Task Force on Access to Professions and Trades made over 100 recommendations to the government on reforms to break down barriers faced by foreign-trained professionals and tradespersons.
In May 1990, the Ontario Council of Regents completed its report Vision 2000, which we alluded to earlier, which recommended fundamental changes to Ontario's colleges of applied arts and technology. With respect to prior learning assessment, it recommended that a prior learning assessment network, PLAN, be established, with the explicit inclusion of Ontario's colleges in the planning, the implementation and the operation of such a system.
In the summer of 1991, the Minister of Colleges and Universities asked the Ontario Council of Regents to set up a committee to advise him on the development and implementation of a system-wide prior learning assessment for Ontario colleges.
In February 1993, following cabinet approval, the Minister of Education and Training again asked the Council of Regents to establish a prior learning assessment advisory and coordinating group with the mandate to coordinate implementation of a comprehensive system of prior learning assessment based largely upon the recommendations of the July 1992 report.
The mandate and composition of the PLA group could be summarized by guiding the implementation of the PLA in Ontario's colleges; providing the minister with policy and funding advice; conducting planning and coordination of PLA pilot projects; coordinating system-wide training and marketing activities; liaising with all colleges on PLA issues; and obviously monitoring the evolution of the initiative.
The PLA group has been asked to conduct studies in the following areas: the cost and benefit of extending PLA practices to the college system; language competence and the portfolio process; the long-term cost of implementing a systematic approach to the evaluation of foreign academic credentials, and the process for developing upgrading and supplementary education programs for foreign-trained individuals.
The PLA group as it exists now is composed of 20 voting members from a wide range of stakeholders, among whom we find college system management, OPSEU, students, business, labour, aboriginal people, community organizations and regulatory bodies. The group also has non-voting liaison members from the following organizations: the Ministry of Education and Training; the Ministry of Citizenship; Ontario secondary schools; the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board, OTAB; the Aboriginal Education Council; the Council for Franco-Ontarian Education and Training and the Council of Ontario Universities.
The PLA group makes recommendations to the Ministry of Education and Training through the Ontario Council of Regents.
What have we accomplished in the first year? In view of the fact that general awareness levels were very low with respect to PLA activities, the group has concentrated efforts and has accomplished the following: reaching agreement on a statement of PLA implementation principles; developing a comprehensive and highly consultative process to develop a policy development strategy; conducting consultation and policy development in several major areas including the mandate, the definitions, grading, transcriptions of PLA credits, OSAP eligibility, college funding and college preparation of courses for PLA.
We have also focused on adopting a PLA training strategy, including mission, goal statements etc. We have promoted the establishment of four PLA regional networks, comprised of college PLA facilitators and other interested college personnel.
We have coordinated eight PLA pilot projects at several colleges which are expected to contribute significantly to the implementation and research activities of the PLA group for the benefit of the system.
We also have provided funding, a special transition project, for the newly created francophone or French-language colleges vis-à-vis the traditional bilingual colleges.
We have participated outside the province in PLA activities also involving the federal government.
The challenges we are facing: In order to ensure the viability, quality and credibility of prior learning assessment, adequate funding needs to be generated. The PLA group will review current levels of PLA funding and fees, along with the costs of PLA in its first year of operation, and will make recommendations to the minister in time for implementation in 1995.
Another challenge facing the PLA initiative is the faculty workload. If PLA is to become a mainstream college activity, which we hope it will be, it needs to be included in the calculation of faculty workloads. Through the Council of Regents, the Human Resources Secretariat is assisting to resolve this issue.
The third challenge for us is PLA training. The need for PLA training activities within the college system has been significant. Since full PLA implementation will eventually affect most of the work of the 8,300 faculty members, there has been a need for strong central support in the development and delivery of PLA training. It is the PLA group's expectation that college personnel who have received training over the past year will assist in providing PLA training to faculty and staff at their own college throughout the implementation period.
What is the future for PLA for the remainder of the mandate? During the next 18 months it will be important for the group to promote participation in PLA activities by learners, by the colleges, to create partnerships with the community and provide the minister with necessary advice for the continuation of the PLA activities.
More specifically, the group will extend PLA funding to the two new French colleges; extend PLA awareness, as I said before, beyond the walls of the college system; focus PLA training activities on certain areas -- portfolio development, portable training materials etc -- and assist colleges in strengthening their networks, developing marketing strategies, completing a schedule of consultation and making recommendations to the minister on the appropriate monitoring and information systems.
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In summary, prior learning assessment is an important initiative, long overdue and it's receiving increasing support from across the province and even the country. Prior learning is currently being reviewed by the federal government as a possible mechanism to ensure maximum use of federal training dollars. Over the past three years, the province of Ontario, the Ontario Council of Regents and the colleges have taken positions of leadership in promoting the development and use of prior learning assessment.
The Council of Regents is well suited to undertake this task given its role as an advisory body to the Minister of Education and Training on matters of policy and particularly given the implications PLA has for the collective agreement and council's links to the College Standards and Accreditation Council, CSAC.
Mr Johnston: I should've said at the outset that Wesley is our chair of the task force on prior learning assessment that reports through the council at this stage.
I'll turn to Jim Turk, who is the chair of our governance committee of the council, to talk about the governance issues.
Dr Jim Turk: We're pleased to have the opportunity to be before this committee. I want to talk briefly about governance and the issues that are before us. We've written a much more detailed document for you that will answer a variety of questions that you might have.
I'd like to highlight three things: the whole question about what is an appropriate model of governance of a public institution, how are boards currently made up in the college system, and what appointment process do we use.
With regard to the first matter, I'm sure that when Bill Davis was Minister of Education, when the college system was being set up, there were many of the same debates going on that there are today as to how you set up college system funded with largely provincial money in a way that it will be publicly accountable.
A number of models were available. We know from the elementary and secondary system that one model would be to have elected board members or elected trustees. A second model that was undoubtedly considered was the model that's followed in some other provinces where you have direct government appointments to college boards. What was opted for was the third model, the one we currently have, where a body of order-in-council appointees is entrusted by government with the responsibility for making appointments and functioning in lieu of the public in providing that kind of accountability.
I think the debate continues today as to which of those three models is the most appropriate, but we feel very strongly that there has to be a strong method in which the public responsibility of these publicly funded bodies is achieved.
With respect to the makeup of the boards, there are 16 voting board members on each community college board: 12 external governors and four internal governors. The 12 external governors are nominated, in a process that I will describe shortly, to the Council of Regents which then makes the decision as to who's going to be appointed.
The four internal governors, a more recent addition, are from four constituencies that are recognized within the college system: faculty, support staff, administrative staff and students, each of whom in a board-conducted election within the college elect their own representative. The internal governors all have the same term as the external governors; namely, a three-year term which is renewable once for a maximum of six years, with the exception of the student governor, who has a term of one year.
The appointment process for the external governors is really the matter we want to discuss with you. On the internal governors, the council's role is largely to ratify the election by their colleagues and appointing those individuals to the board. In addition, there is one ex officio member of the board and that's the president of the college, so 16 voting members and one ex officio member who in some colleges votes and in other colleges does not.
With regard to the appointment process, it's relatively straightforward. Nominations by the regulation can come to the council from the college board or from other sources. That's the term that's used in the regulation, "other sources." In practice, virtually all of the nominations we consider come from the boards. If a name comes to us from another source, we send it to the college board for its consideration.
We adopted a procedure in 1989 in which we asked the boards not only to nominate individuals but also to submit a protocol which shares with us their view of their immediate and long-term needs and objectives within the geographical, cultural and socioeconomic framework of their college catchment area.
The names then are examined in light of this protocol and decisions by the council are made, and while there's been a lot of talk of the council's relationship with the boards, the fact is, since the fall of 1990, out of more than 300, only two people have been appointed to a college board whose names were not recommended to the council by the college.
In fact, if we go back further, as far as we've been able to tell on the records, in 1986 there was one person appointed to the Centennial board who had not been nominated by that board. In the spring of 1990 there were three people appointed to the Centennial board whose names had not been forwarded by that board, and since then, as I say, there've only been two appointments out of more than 300 that haven't come from the board.
The appointment process is one where we try to encourage an ongoing relationship with the council. The council is divided into liaison teams so that there are at least two council members whose job is to make themselves available to college boards before and during the nomination process, and at other times as the college board may want, to meet with them to hear their concerns, to share with them other information of what may be happening in the system and in general to be a link between the council and the college board.
The council, I guess parenthetically, tries to apply to itself the same appointment procedures that we follow, recommend and urge upon the college system.
In the six years that I've been on the council, we wrestled with the same basic questions: How do we assure equitable representation on these now 25 boards, and how do we ensure, across the diversity of the communities that make up the college catchment area, that there's an active linkage of board members to the communities from which they come, whether they be geographic communities or socioeconomic communities or cultural communities?
I would draw to your attention page 13 of the document that we've distributed to you as a way of suggesting there's really not much new here. This is a document from the guidelines to governors in August 1972 which is as fine a statement of the objectives of the governance committee and of the current Council of Regents as any I have read.
It talks about the council's role in filling appointments. It says: "...the boards should bear in mind that it represents the people of the whole college area, and not just a local community. Members should be drawn from a variety of occupations, interests and backgrounds, and should be representative of any large proportion of citizens of distinctive national origin, race, religion or economic status."
It goes on in the second paragraph to say: "While the Council of Regents relies on boards to recommend new members, it must be appreciated that nominations may be received from other sources. In any case, the Council of Regents makes the appointment which in its judgement will best serve the individual college and the system as a whole."
We continue in the council, I would conclude, to look for ways to set up a structure of appointments to ensure that we have college boards that function as far as possible to be fully publicly accountable for the public bodies for which they have so much responsibility.
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Mr Johnston: The council has been going through a long review process, as indicated in the document, and is in the process of trying to finalize a report to the minister which we hope to have in his hands in the next couple of weeks, and we're encouraging him to make it public as quickly as possible so that people can understand the recommendations that we will finally be putting forward to him. But we can come back to that in questions. I turn to Diane Dubois to talk a little bit about some of the francophone affairs issues.
Ms Diane Dubois: Madam Chair, ladies and gentlemen, I'll begin my address in French, if you need to have some translation.
C'est un principe reconnu au sein du gouvernement de l'Ontario que la province doit promouvoir un réseau collégial capable de bien répondre à la diversité des besoins de sa population. Avec la mise sur pied de trois collèges de langue française, il est essentiel que les organismes et agences du gouvernement reconnaissent la dualité linguistique.
J'aimerais aujourd'hui vous indiquer les moyens pris par le Conseil ontarien des affaires collégiales pour tenir compte de cette dualité et vous informer aussi des activités du Comité des affaires francophones.
Interjections.
The Chair: If you could just wait one moment, please. One of our little microphones isn't working properly.
Mme Dubois : Tout le monde est correct pour continuer ? D'accord.
Donc, j'aimerais aujourd'hui vous indiquer les moyens mis en place...
Interjection.
Ms Dubois: Actually, I was just going to speak in French for the first minute, so maybe we can forget it.
The Chair: Maybe if you could speak in English, we could carry on.
Ms Dubois: Okay, I can. Just the introductory remarks, because I thought maybe something like this would happen. It would be better to get the important things through.
Donc, j'aimerais aujourd'hui vous parler des moyens mis en place par le Conseil ontarien des affaires collégiales pour tenir compte de la dualité linguistique et vous informer aussi des activités du Comité des affaires francophones. Il est impératif que les représentants francophones apportent une perspective conforme aux intérêts et aux aspirations de la communauté franco-ontarienne. C'est pourquoi le Conseil s'est entouré de francophones très représentatifs de leur communauté. De manière à appuyer les efforts du Comité, le Conseil a doté son secrétariat d'un personnel bilingue.
I would now like, Madam Chair, ladies and gentlemen, to speak to the mandate of the francophone affairs committee.
The primary mandate of the committee is to provide informed policy advice for consideration by council on policies regarding French-language education. To do this, the committee identifies and brings to the attention of council issues and policies which affect French-language college education. It also analyses and makes recommendations to council on the potential impact on Ontario's francophones of policies and positions developed by council.
It is also this committee that receives the nominations for appointment to the board of governors of the French-language colleges and, following consultation with the Franco-Ontarian education and training council, makes recommendations to council.
With respect to the process of appointing new francophone members of COR, I'd like to illustrate the overall framework of policies and practices by telling you about my personal experience.
With a vacancy on council, a profile was developed to help assist in finding the qualified candidate. Geographically, the person had to be from southwestern Ontario. For gender parity, it had to be a woman. In the skills mix, the need was for someone in small business, entrepreneurial and/or agriculture, and the person had to be a francophone with very strong links to her community.
The committee approached the Office of Francophone Affairs as well as the provincial body of the French Canadian association of Ontario, l'Association canadienne-française de l'Ontario, and my name was put forth as a very active French-speaking farmer with a small business in St Thomas. I was thrilled to come on board to represent at this very exciting time for post-secondary education in our community.
The names that are brought forth to council for consideration by the government's appointments secretariat are always names that are received from Franco-Ontarian organizations and community groups. The same consultative process was undertaken following the government's announcement in July 1993 of the creation of two new French-language colleges. COR appointed a selection committee to undertake a search and selection process, to ensure that the resulting boards would have the necessary mix of skills as well as the Franco-Ontarian community's social, cultural and regional diversity.
The members of the selection committee, which represent community and education groups, solicited nominations from different Franco-Ontarian communities and a public call was also made through the media. In November 1993, the Council of Regents announced the appointment of the two new boards and also organized an orientation session for the new members.
I would like to mention quickly at this time the brief that was presented to you by the board of governors of la Cité collégiale, in which the governors note the contribution of council in the success of their college in the first few months. The board also applauds the recent initiative taken by the francophone affairs committee to increase the communication links between the three French-language colleges. The feedback has been very positive from the three French-language colleges as to what COR and our committee are doing.
As we've heard from Mr Romulus, from time to time council, ministry and other organizations undertake special initiatives on policy development activities relating to college education. It is government policy that such activities be undertaken in an integrated fashion, recognizing the existence of both English-language colleges and French-language colleges. The francophone affairs committee here plays a very key role in identifying individuals and organizations to be involved in these activities and advises COR on appropriate nominations.
Again to cite from personal experience, I was on the school's colleges implementation and advisory committee. COR's francophone committee was key in identifying the need for a francophone perspective in this important project and assisted in establishing a subcommittee. Specific recommendations coming from this subcommittee now form an integral part of the final draft report.
I think I've taken my five minutes. I would be certainly happy to answer any questions. Merci beaucoup.
Mr Johnston: I'll just turn to Ted Hargreaves to deal with the human resource issues briefly, although when I say "briefly," when you consider we're $2 billion worth of pension plans, 16,000 people whom we bargain for, we shouldn't give it short shrift. It is a major function, and Ted's the chair of our human resources committee.
Mr Ted Hargreaves: I was told I have three minutes, so $2.8 billion, that's about the best, I guess, we can do. But indeed, the council does have responsibilities in the human resource area. Our principal one is we act as a negotiator: We are agent for the 25 colleges and we negotiate with our employees, OPSEU academic and OPSEU support. The total number of employees in those contract areas is about 12,700. In addition, we have administration staff. Total employees number 16,800 and, as was mentioned, we have an $800-million payroll in the college system.
The other responsibility that we have is the pension responsibility for the colleges. That's known as the CAAT, college of applied arts and technology, pension. It is currently, with assets, approximately $2 billion in size. We are going through a joint trusteeship arrangement right now with a lot of help. We are working with all the members of the pension plan to ensure that we have joint trusteeship. The trustee for our pension plan is currently OMERS.
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Those are the central responsibilities of the human resources committee. Some current issues before the committee, of course, are the implementing and monitoring of the social contract, the transition agreements -- you just heard Diane's reference to the fact that we now have two francophone colleges. Particularly in the north we have staff moving from the northern colleges to Collège Boréal, and there is an agreement in place to ensure that is done harmoniously.
That was worked out through our committee with all of the presidents or their appropriate representatives of the colleges.
In addition, of course, there's pay equity, employment equity and health and safety legislation and compliance that we're working on.
There's also something called the comprehensive human resource information system, which was requested under the College Relations Commission for collective bargaining. That group is also working under our auspices and we are trying to ensure that we garner accurate and competent information for bargaining purposes, and we are dedicating many resources and individuals to that.
We have just finished, and I think the report is out, quality education in a fiscally responsible manner. That came out of our committee also and it has been issued, and of course the pension plan restructuring, and they are some of the current issues.
I am concluding my first term. I don't know if anyone will ever let me back, but it's about three years that I have been on council. I'm an accountant in my real life up north. Something which I found refreshing, exciting and wonderful was a commitment and a dedication in the human resource area to something called collaboration and inclusion. Those, I know, are words, but the people on that committee and at COR and in the Human Resources Secretariat actually live it.
There is a distinguished past president in this province by the name of Doug Light, whom I worked with and learned so much from when he chaired our committee, about the commitment to collaboration and inclusion. One particular example is: This group of COR, as you see it today, created something called the human resources management steering committee. The key word in there is "management." The purpose of that is to ensure that in fact COR does represent the colleges, that we are in touch, not out of touch. We have 15 management and administrative people from the colleges on that committee. There are two members from COR and COR staff as resource people. We feel that through that kind of commitment, of course, we are in touch with college management and with the mandates when you're talking an $800-million payroll.
The other thing that reflects collaboration and inclusion is the formation of the administrative staff consultative committee. Formally, our administrative staff are not organized and are not represented. It is through COR and through this initiative found and probably fostered by Doug so well that we actually encourage administrative staff to come forth, to bring their interests and to meet with the committee.
We also have a commitment to lessening the adversarial environment which existed. I think we must remember that one of the most important things is that the college sector has had two strikes. The most recent was in 1989. That was not long ago. One of the initiatives of COR is to try and ensure that through collaboration and inclusion and communication we try and lessen any adverse relationship which may exist.
Some of the things we have done to ensure that those things don't continue is that we are working vigorously on an information system so that both parties receive accurate information for bargaining purposes. Secondly, we have a task force on the quality of education in a fiscally responsible environment, previously mentioned, just issued, we have a joint insurance committee and we have the employer-employee relations committee which, on an ongoing basis, reviews issues of concern so that we don't have surprises at the bargaining table. Those are some of the examples.
However, in addition to that, COR is involved in policy advisory projects for the minister, as you know. In every one of those cases, we also have opened the door and invited all of our stakeholders, from the president's office down, to be at the table for communications, input and consultation. Some of them are PLA, anti-harassment and discrimination, college restructuring committees and awareness, and we hope that kind of awareness leads to understanding.
Finally, in closing, there are some organizational issues which most everyone in the room is probably aware of, and that is that in the Colleges Collective Bargaining Commission of 1988, one of the members of the commission, Mr Gandz, recommended the formation of an employers' association. That employers' association was included in Bill 23, which had its first reading on May 27, 1992. We're awaiting instruction from the government as to how it wishes to go ahead with that.
However, in light of the achievements which been made in openness and in collaboration and in communication, not everyone today is as committed to that change as was once thought, especially now when there is so much change coming: We're exiting the social contract; we have money pressures, as our chair had referred to; we have something like I think 25% less money and 35% or 25% growth in actual students; we're committed to access. So we're trying very, very hard to do much more with much less and I don't think we can ask much more out of the system.
Mr Johnston: I won't take you through the appendices in any detail but there are some you might be interested in noting: the roles of various liaison teams through the colleges that are attached; participation on a whole range of other external committees that members are on; the latest version of our bimonthly newsletter, which will give you I think a pretty good idea of the participation by people external to the colleges as well as in the colleges in a lot of our processes; our model for appointment that Jim took you through a little bit; a self-identification form which we now try to get information about -- the skills mix -- and the first statistical results of that. You may be interested in that section which indicates the profile of the actual members of the college boards we have appointed in the last three years. The last two years' statistics indicated there are accurate. The first year was a partial statistic.
The other challenges before us -- I think, Ted gave a very quick overview of the full variety of the human resource issues. They're laid out in some detail for you as well. We did give a major submission to staff, and I don't know how much of that you've received and how much has been condensed for you in the normal fashion that takes place. But if there are further background documents that you want in terms of our authorizations or other kinds of things to do with our mandate, we'd be more than happy to get them to you during this week. We'll have staff around the committee in case you need us to pick up information for you during the week.
The Chair: Thank you for that offer, Mr Johnston. This agency was a selection of the third party, so I think we will start the rotation of questions with Mrs Cunningham.
Mrs Dianne Cunningham (London North): Good to see you. Thank you very much for being here today. I would just like to start by asking a general question with regard to the expansion, not obviously of your role but certainly of your work, and perhaps you could fill us in. One of the big questions that we get even from within the colleges themselves is that your budget has increased to such an extent. I asked it once and it really upset Richard, so I thought I'd let him answer it again.
Mr Johnston: Let me deal with the functions and let Ted respond, if he wants, on the budget side, if that would be all right.
Mr Gary Malkowski (York East): Could you repeat the end of your question, please?
Mrs Cunningham: I asked this question once, Gary, and it really upset Richard -- I also have a cold -- so I'm asking it again so he can answer it on the public record.
Mr Johnston: On the functions, I think I talked a little bit about the role of prior learning and CSAC. Out of the Vision 2000 document it was actually specifically stated that the Council of Regents should take responsibility for the establishment of the standards and accreditation body. Out of the establishment board process which led up to the beginning of the council it was also felt that should happen. That was internal stakeholders; external stakeholders all accepted that kind of notion. So we have taken on that responsibility.
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Prior learning responsibility was addressed through that joint committee we talked about, and it also requested that council take the lead at this time. That's a three-year budget commitment in that case, which we don't presume will be continued after that.
CSAC, we would prefer that you deal with them directly on how they see their role with us, but our role with CSAC has been to give them as much hands-off control as possible on the things that they're doing. But they needed an order-in-council authority to do the things they do, and rather than establishing a new agency, the government wished an existing agency with order-in-council status to be its vehicle for existence. We are the only order-in-council group within the college system that could have done that. That's why it has been vested in us to this point. Council still is of the belief it should be a fully independent body, but that is not the way it has developed.
I'll let Ted maybe respond, as our accountant, to the issues of our budget.
Mr Hargreaves: The budget references actually are on a document that I have -- unclear. It looks like it's responses to questions. I don't know if you would ever get that, but anyway, it's on page 14 of that. You're absolutely right in terms of the total budget having grown. However, that is only because of directed projects by the minister to COR, and they are all projects that in my understanding are centred around the college system, be it PLA or CSAC.
The actual COR budget, the reason that I'm interested in this is because when I came to council, I asked that a finance committee be formed, and that seemed to be an oddity because there wasn't one down here. Anyway, we started pulling out our figures, looking at our budget, how to cut or manage costs, because Richard thought we should do this reaching out to the colleges and have liaison teams, and that is very expensive. So, in order to have liaison teams and to be in the colleges, we had to look at our resources.
The actual central budget of COR has actually decreased and it has decreased significantly. With the last three hits it's decreased, I think, from 1992-93 almost 25%. I'm not trying to mislead, but I think that's about what has happened with the latest one that we understand may be coming to COR. We don't, in the COR area, have more staff; we actually have less staff. However, because of the projects, the budget I think is about $2.7 million or in that area, principally because of CSAC-PLA college restructuring, and we now have added into our budget the Human Resources Secretariat that we used not to have. The Human Resources Secretariat budget is approximately $435,000 and that is the committee that I chair.
In terms of COR's budget, it has actually shrunk. It's shrunk significantly, actually, regrettably.
Mrs Cunningham: Yes.
Mr Hargreaves: Probably like everybody else's.
Mrs Cunningham: The reason that I'm intent on asking the question is because I obviously get asked them a lot and I think it's important that the public understand the projects the Council of Regents has taken upon itself, I might add with the direction of the minister, I understand. But if you look at your base budget in 1991-92 of $671,100, and in 1994-95 about $634,000, it hasn't changed a lot. You've been asked to do work and you're supposed to be advising the minister and making board appointments and collective bargaining. But I'm in the business of educating kids.
I personally am not interested in spending a lot of money in that area at all. When one has to prioritize and you come and the first statement you make is that you've got more students and you're trying to educate them on less dollars, you have to ask why the other piece -- if you subtract the $634,000 from the $2.7 million, clearly over $2 million is being spent on these projects. That's a lot of money.
It's gone from $1.5 million in 1991-92, and I know that you've acquired somebody else's budget. If you want to take out human resources -- I have no idea why they stuck you with it, anyway; I would have objected if I'd been you, Richard -- it makes it even worse. You can take that out if you want to, but it's all part of the administration, I think, of a system.
One of the great complaints is that there isn't enough money in the front lines. The hard work in teaching -- and you know from the results of your prior learning assessment the kind of work that has to be done to get students up to a certain level so that they can benefit from a college education -- is just that.
I guess I can ask you the next question: Are these dollars, in your opinion, spent wisely? Will this kind of money be spent next year? How much longer will the PLA -- and I have great respect for what's happening -- CSAC, human resources and the college restructuring -- I understand that's done, anyway -- continue? I'm talking about administration, exactly what you used to talk about when you had my job.
Mr Johnston: I'd be happy to respond directly. The college restructuring, as you say, is completed already, although the report isn't in and we're doing the final work on that out of our existing budget without any extra financing.
Prior learning assessment was a three-year project; we have about 18 months left, as Wesley said. It shows $446,000 there in terms of the amount of money allocated for the policy development work, the training etc of people across the system so we do this consistently. But about $1 million has also gone out directly to the system for the hiring of facilitators in each college to be able to undertake prior learning assessment across the system.
Prior learning assessment, of course, is a tool for getting more people into the system and therefore I think that's money that is very well spent because it's going to increase the effectiveness of people coming into the system, number one, in terms of the time it takes them to get through -- they should be able to go through more cost-effectively -- and it just stops a lot of the hurdle-jumping that was necessary for adults coming into the system prior to that. So we think that's a good benefit.
CSAC, the standards and accreditation body, has been demanded by industry and the student population for years, saying, "We've got to have transferability of credit; we've got to know what the standards are across our system." It's no longer good enough to say that we just do that at college level. We've maintained the college level accountability but we've got to put in a provincial accountability as well. We think, as an economic development for the colleges, to be able to be part of the economic development of the province more effectively, that is just crucial. All the members of our system have proved that in the past.
That budget of $1.2 million is almost all spent on drawing stakeholders from the system and from outside the system together to make sure our standards are being appropriately developed. It's not an insular kind of thing at all. The staffing for it comes in large part right out of the colleges themselves, so most of those people are secondees to make sure the kind of policy development we're doing is appropriate. That kind of budget of around a million and a half I think for the long term was seen to be the ongoing kinds of costs for an agency like CSAC, as it does ongoing review of standards in the future, and was seen to be a very necessary quality control that we were missing in the system over the years. As I say, if you look at the Vision 2000 document, everybody felt that was necessary and we still hear back from industry today that we aren't moving on it fast enough.
On the other budget, we were glad to take the HR secretariat as our own because in fact about 10% of what they were doing was for the ministry, in the past, and 90% was for us. It just didn't make any sense to have the budget lying within the ministry, so it is more accountably with the Council of Regents than it would be otherwise.
Mrs Cunningham: When you talk about the recommendations from Vision 2000, and we're talking about the first recommendation, of course, when they identified the problems within the system, the whole area of the lack of system-wide standards and quality planning, you're trying to take care of that. You mentioned that's finished this year?
Mr Johnston: That is the standards and accreditation council mandate?
Mrs Cunningham: Yes.
Mr Johnston: No. That will be an ongoing body that is required to look after standards from now on, all being well. It's a moving thing. They'll be here to talk to you on Wednesday to go through the detail on where they're going, although I know they've already met with you as well to sort of brief you on their activities. But that's ongoing.
Mrs Cunningham: Okay, I'll wait on that one. The prior learning assessment, you mentioned, was a three-year --
Mr Johnston: Yes. Our goal there is to set up the provincial standard for prior learning assessment and to make sure everybody's trained in a similar fashion, look at any of the policy issues that need to be addressed during that period and then hopefully have that handled by the colleges -- one of the reasons, as Wesley indicated, we're setting up regional networks to do local support for colleges as they move forward in the future.
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Mrs Cunningham: Actually, it does show a four-year budget. It started in 1991-92, $139,700; projected for 1994-95, $446,600.
Mr Johnston: The money that's in for the year with $139,700 was in fact the work of the committee, the task force, that set up the recommendations, and then the government decided it wished to proceed with them, and so the full budget came in the following year. So it's three years ending in 1996, and I think it's quite possible that we will be able to phase out some of the activities we're doing more quickly than that and transfer even more of the money that goes directly to facilitators etc into the system during that period.
Mrs Cunningham: Well, if you are going to take on some of the responsibilities, or you've been asked to, the Council of Regents -- I think most of the members of the public took a look at you as being an adviser to the minister -- then I suppose some of the other problems, as identified, you're going to be responsible for as well in some way. Two that I get, I suppose, that are discussed in my office a lot -- and some of my colleagues may relate to this -- are the high rates of inadequate reading and writing skills among incoming college students and a 50% dropout rate.
So one of the questions that we want to know the answer to is if our college system is training young people. One of the other challenges is that we're not meeting our job market, our labour force needs. I heard you mention OTAB earlier. That's another subject. But all of these issues have to be dealt with by someone. Now, is this also going to be your responsibility?
Mr Johnston: Well, coordinating the look at a couple of those issues has been, and some of them have been dealt with in other venues. The restructuring committee that was alluded to very briefly had as one of its prime emphases the issue of retention, to deal with the difficulties of success rate, if I can put it that way, in the first year of schooling. A sense of lack of preparation for students coming in, that was a major concern on the one hand, but also we're not sure that our funding formula and other things really allowed us to do the kind of remedial supports that were necessary for a lot of people, especially people coming in not directly out of grade 12.
If you look at Centennial College this year, 70% of its students this year don't come out of high school; they come from other sources. Those people may have been out of the system for a long, long time. So we think that retention is a major issue to be looked at, and we're hoping the restructuring committee will have some good suggestions there.
The school college committee that Diane is working on, which is another venue, a joint committee between the high schools and ourselves, is looking at enhanced articulation, and we hope by the end of October that their report will be public, Dianne, so you'll be able to see some of the suggestions they're making to increase the success rates there. There are some wonderful best practices out there that need to be systematized a little bit. We also work very closely with ACAATO in terms of some of the sharing of resources etc across the system to make us more effective. So we are one of the players but not the only player by any means.
Mrs Cunningham: I guess one of the other issues there, then, is your relationship with the secondary schools, because if we're educating our young people and we're trying to meet certain standards, surely you should be expecting at least if they come from within the Ontario system that they qualify, and maybe they do. Is that where you're finding the difficulty, or is it elsewhere?
Mr Johnston: Well, I don't know if Diane would like to join in on this one, but I think one of the real issues, from my perception, is that the high school system for years has been designed for two prime purposes; one was to get people ready for work after grade 12, and 65% or so of the population has traditionally gone directly from school to work. However, the other group has been primarily directed towards university, and very little of curriculum development and very little of counselling has actually guided people into the colleges. We think that in fact there needs to be a change of emphasis in curriculum around applied learning.
Some of the things we learned at the CSAC table, for instance, is that a lot of advance-level math students in the high school system cannot handle applied math when they get to the colleges. They can handle theoretical math when they go to university, interestingly, but they have difficulty with applied math. So there is a fair amount of collaboration going on right now at a staff level and at the board-style level with people like Diane to try to work through some of those things. I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about your experience.
Ms Dubois: Well, I think you'll find the school-college report very interesting, because that was the major focus, I think, to get the secondary and the college sectors together to discuss how we can alleviate this problem of success and access of our students. There are many very important recommendations coming out of that to try to streamline and get the curriculum alignment from the secondary school to the colleges much more successful so that the pathways are as clear for the colleges as the pathways to university for the students. I think that's certainly addressed in that report.
Mrs Cunningham: Just in listening to Wesley talking about the challenges with regard to funding, faculty workload and training, and Diane now talking about curriculum, I just think you're all heavily involved in the operational side of the colleges. If that's what you're going to do, I think you should be speaking to the minister so that the system understands your role.
Mr Johnston: I hear continually about this confusion of role, but I just remind people who are confused that most of them signed documents like the CSAC document, like the Vision 2000 statement, all saying that these things should be done by the Council of Regents, and now they're confused by the role being undertaken.
We don't actually see ourselves as getting highly involved in the operations. On PLA, we are trying to assist in the implementation of something which does not just include the colleges but rightfully includes the broad communities in that process. Of all the groups in the college system at the moment, and you can ask the others, we are the only one province-wide that has already developed those kinds of networks.
There was also a lack of expertise in PLA, in the system, anything on a systematic basis, and so it had to reside somewhere. I believe it's much more cost-effective to do that at the Council of Regents than it is to do it within the ministry, which is your only other option under law. There's no other group that has mention in the act and authority within the act.
We're not actually taking on roles here that are unnatural for the Council of Regents. You go back and look at the things that were done during the beginning of the system or even in the mid-1970s, when all sorts of program approval took place there and other kinds of things, those authorities have been vested there in the past. We're in fact trying to do it on a limited basis, with huge inclusion of everybody so that the rules are clear about who is doing what and to get that transferred over to them.
In the case of standards and accreditation, we think there is a need for a new body, and it needs to sit separate. The government decided to save some money by having it attached to us. One of the ways they saved money is that I was the acting director without pay for this last year, and that was a much more effective way than putting in an ADM to run that thing. So I think we've been quite cost-effective.
Mrs Cunningham: Nobody's going to complain about that, Richard, but your own family.
Mr Johnston: They can't complain. Compared with what I made as an MPP, I obviously earn more now.
Mr James J. Bradley (St Catharines): Everybody earns more than an MPP.
Mr Johnston: Jim, I think that's true.
The Chair: You have one minute left.
Mrs Cunningham: Someone mentioned that two of the 300 appointments had not come from the board. What did you mean by that?
Mr Johnston: In the cases Jim was raising, in our history there has been a total of only seven individuals we could go back and find who had been appointed in recent years who had not come directly as part of a board's nomination slate.
Mrs Cunningham: Where would they come from?
Mr Johnston: The greater community, names that were brought forward.
Mrs Cunningham: Through the minister?
Mr Johnston: I don't know of any. Jim can talk about them.
Mrs Cunningham: Where were they, Jim?
Dr Turk: The regulations specify that anyone is entitled to make a nomination to the Council of Regents for appointment, so sometimes people would write directly to us, some community groups would put a name forward, sometimes MPPs put names forward. Our usual practice -- and I can't think of an exception to that -- is to then send those names on to the college board for its consideration. The figures I was sharing with you were the number of times in which we appointed someone the college had not recommended. In other words, since the fall of 1990, we've only appointed two people who were not from the slate of names the college recommended to us.
Mrs Cunningham: Was this Conestoga, then?
Mr Johnston: One of them.
Dr Turk: Only one in --
Mrs Cunningham: Is that settled now?
Dr Turk: The appointments have been made.
Mr Johnston: We have to be cautious, as we get into this.
Mrs Cunningham: If you don't mind us pursuing this, just take your time.
Mr Johnston: I'll just give a short answer. I can't talk about individuals; what I can talk about is the process. As of June, the Conestoga board has a full slate of members on its board at this stage.
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Mr Malkowski: Thank you for your presentation. You were talking about reforms, and you said that a report would be released in a few weeks. I guess I can't ask any more about that because it's not been released yet, but there's some disturbing information I've read, college board statistics talking about self-identification and the number of disabled people and what a low percent of people are appointed to college boards. Could you perhaps tell me why that percentage is so low? Is COR committed to raising those statistics to really reflect the diversity and to try and find a balance within the community?
Mr Johnston: I think if you turn to the appendix that Mr Malkowski's talking about you can see that over the last couple of years, through the use of the self-identification form, we've been able to note that there has been some growth of representation in a number of areas.
The one area that I think is still a disappointment to us is the area of having disabled people represented on boards. I think it's fair to say that as we've gone through each iteration over the last decade of getting more representative boards, there has been difficulty in doing it, and then once it's been done, it's been well accepted. I think of the fact that in spite of the announcement in 1972 that Jim read out about diversity on the boards, the Council of Regents itself only had four women out of 15 on it at that point as it made that announcement, and the average number of women in the mid-1980s would have been three per board, with a maximum of five on any one board. Now gender parity is accepted throughout.
There's still a little bit of grumbling around the move that was made by Minister Conway and others in the late 1980s about internal governors having representation. On the one hand, you get some people who say that there's a conflict of interest with those people being on a board; on the other hand, some people complain that they're treated as second-class governors. So that's still settling it's way through.
The issue of disabilities and people with disabilities being represented on the board is something we've only been addressing in the last three years or so in an aggressive fashion, with annual letters to the boards indicating that we were disappointed in the results. But when you're looking for 12 members, external members on a board, and you're trying to put together all the talents etc that are indicated in this document that shows the kind of people who have come on to our boards, some boards have said that was difficult to accomplish.
We intend to make this a major priority over this next time. As you can see, on the representation of aboriginal representatives on the board, we have actually made substantial gains in the last few years, even though three years ago you would have been told that was a very difficult thing to try to accomplish.
Mr Malkowski: I hope that when we're talking about the governance report this issue will be raised there, but thank you very much.
Mr Tony Martin (Sault Ste Marie): I want to be on the record commending you for the tremendous efforts that you're making. I know first hand from my position within the Ministry of Education and Training and as parliamentary assistant the work that is being done within the ministry to make sure that our colleges are in a place to prepare our young people for the future and to offer the best of services in some very difficult, challenging times. That's a big task at the best of times.
I wanted to ask you just a couple of questions, and it's around the linking that I think needs to happen between high schools, colleges and universities. In my community, Sault Ste Marie, you may be aware that we have an organization called Bridges which is developing common agreements between the Lake Superior State University, Sault College and Algoma University College. There's beginning to be a flow back and forth and around, and a sharing of resources, such as libraries and library resources, and those kinds of things.
I'll ask you two questions in one so that others can get on the docket here. My first question is, how many pilots of that kind do you have happening out there, and how is that going? I ask that because I've had my own personal experience. I went to university and then after finishing university decided I needed to know how to do something, so I went to community college and graduated from there.
Mr Johnston: That factor is happening a lot more.
Mr Martin: Some of my friends saw it as a step backwards or down or whatever. Certainly for me it was a step forward and out into the workplace, and it was very good. So I'm asking you what is happening, outside of the example that I gave you in Sault Ste Marie, in the province to have those linkages more out there and people using them?
I know that you've made presentation today on the prior learning experiment and work that you're doing there and common standards across the province so that people are being both recognized and prepared. The second question is, what work are you doing within the council to help colleges and communities identify more readily what it is people will have to know how to do in the next century? That's one of the big questions that people ask me in my constituency office: Are we preparing our kids for the next century or are we preparing them for jobs that are just not going to be there, that have disappeared? Somebody has to be doing some work around that; I'm wondering if the council is, and if it's not, who is.
Mr Johnston: On the first, I think that the statistic of people coming from university backgrounds to colleges is changing at a phenomenal rate. I haven't seen the statistics this year, but last year one out of five students, 20% of the students, coming to colleges had university degrees or experience. The percentage of graduates of colleges going on to universities had not changed dramatically at all.
I think a lot of people were going through what you went through. It's a major trend, and it is one of the reasons why having some standards across the system is so important in terms of knowing what people can bring as credit, and with prior learning to make sure those people who have got a really broad general education from a BA don't have to go through all of that again as they come back into the colleges. That's a very important step.
We have a number of projects: some that started under transition money two years ago; some like the Mohawk-McMaster and Seneca-York projects, where there are actual physical structures the universities will be sharing; a place like Canadore of course has for years shared with Nipissing, a university now. There are a number of individual examples of that. The minister has encouraged people, following the latest Pitman report, to actually go and develop a consortia to try to encourage this to happen more quickly.
Council is of the opinion that they should have gone further still and actually had a body that could require that kind of collaboration more than we have presently, because nobody has that authority at this stage. Maybe Walter wants to talk about that when he comes forward here.
I think there are a lot of things happening, but not as many as in other jurisdictions. You look at British Columbia and you look at the role of colleges that are giving degrees at this point, that is just not part of the culture of Ontario at all in terms of the relationship between the colleges and universities.
In terms of the work in terms of market prediction, one thing you can say over the years is that everybody's been abysmal at it. I'm not sure if us joining the research on that would necessarily make it any more effective.
I think our approaches are twofold. The colleges are a very practical system. First, we have our advisory committees on a local level. They have their feet on the ground and know the local pulse in every community in terms of what hiring is happening and where people think growth should take place. That is still one of the strongest aspects of the college system that Mr Davis required us to have during the beginning of the system. But I think as well the collaboration at the standards and accreditation level across the province is also going to help, as well as at the prior learning assessment table, where people can come forward and start to exchange practical experiences about where growth is taking place and making sure that we aren't spending too much time going down dead ends.
That being said, we believe that OTAB is in fact probably a more effective place for this kind of research to be taking place, and it is a place where they in fact intend to do this kind of market research. We have OTAB at each of our tables. Hopefully, therefore we will, then, make sure that colleges are very much in tune with the philosophy of the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board as it moves forward in that area. We actually think the market partners of labour and businesses on that board are much better predictors than are the providers of service. We tend to sometimes get the fact that we need budget in the way of decision-making there, whereas people who are driving the engine of the economy generally speaking have a clearer vision; at least we certainly hope so. They do better than government did in the past anyway.
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Mr Kimble Sutherland (Oxford): I guess I just want to make the comment that it would seem sometimes in this particular committee when an opposition party chooses an agency to be reviewed it's because they're looking for a bad-news story in terms of how it's reflected out in the public but maybe good news from their perspective.
It would seem to me, regarding what you've presented today, that really what we're hearing is a good-news story in terms of how your organization as the college of regents has been operating and how the college system has really responded to the dramatic changes overall in terms of the increased enrolment. Everyone understands the tight financial times and so I think that's good to hear. I'm sure, based on the questions Dianne was asking, which were good questions -- and she didn't add any comments afterwards, so I know she'll be going back and telling everybody what a good job the college of regents is doing and getting rid of all the confusion that may be out there.
Mrs Cunningham: No, I can't get rid of the confusion. I can't do that, Kimble. I'd love to.
Mr Robert W. Runciman (Leeds-Grenville): An election will do that.
Mr Sutherland: Oh, I'm sure you will, Dianne. Anyway, I do think, though, it's a very good news story here. Obviously there are still more things to go on, but the work you're doing with the standards and accreditation council, the prior learning assessment -- I will tell you I had someone in my office about three weeks ago regarding child care supervisors. She had run her own child care for about 20 years and still going through the challenges of being recognized for that. That ongoing work is definitely still needed.
The one question I just wanted to ask though is, there is a sense, and folks in my part of the province -- and I guess I'm sometimes guilty of this too -- are always worried about the big, bad people here in Toronto dictating to them how they should operate. Some people feel that in terms of your organization's role in terms of appointments and other things, you are trying to give that big, bad central Toronto-oriented approach to how these community -- emphasis on community -- colleges operate.
I don't get that from your presentation today, but I'm wondering if you could just comment. You mentioned earlier about the tension, but maybe comment as to how you see that balance going in the future in terms of ensuring there is some province-wide accountability, but still meeting community needs.
Mr Johnston: I think the whole system is committed to the need for local and provincial balance. We wouldn't want to move, quite frankly, to the Quebec system of overcentralization. We think there's been a lot of strength in a decentralized approach, but we've also had some weaknesses there and we're trying to address some of those at the moment.
I think it's also fair to say that you look at the depth of the reforms we're looking at and compare, for instance, what we've been doing on CSAC on generic skills in only a nine-month period to what's been going on in the high schools over a decade around standards in that area, we are moving reforms at an incredible pace and it would be bizarre to think that there wouldn't be some backlash to the speed of reforms, especially in a time of the huge insecurities that are out there at the moment.
I'm not surprised about that, but I think, as a committee, if you listen to who comes before you, you'll see that there are very different opinions about what the Council of Regents has been doing, depending on the stakeholder groups. We don't serve just one, in our view, we try to represent the interests of all the stakeholders, as well as the interests of the general public. That balance is sometimes hard to do and you sometimes take some flak for it, and I think we've had a little bit of that.
In terms of being the big, bad people from Toronto, it's always amusing to Ted from North Bay and Diane from St Thomas to be numbered among those, not to mention Mary Lou Iahtail from Moosonee. As we make decisions, we try to be as responsive as possible to the needs locally. At least five of the people on our council have been past board chairs, generally speaking, or board members. We have now tried to get a small group of at least four to five francophones on at all times and we try to be representative of the overall communities. You can see by the map of where people are from.
It's also fair to say that we recognize we have a provincial role, and I think it's important for anybody who is in government or aspires to government, and it's always the case during election years that everybody's aspiring to government, except for me who retired instead of that sort of thing --
Mrs Cunningham: At least to this point.
Mr Johnston: But those who do should think about the nature of the accountability. These are all provincial tax dollars. This system started off with four municipal members on each board, produced by the local elected councils. That was ended because in fact there was no local money involved and they couldn't get a deal from the local council to come on to the local boards of colleges.
This is a provincial system. You want to sponsor decentralized creativity. That's been vital to the system, but you also have a responsibility for the system as a whole, like the universities or any other sections of the education system, and therefore you need a group that is actually keeping that board appointment process accountable. So there will always be some tension. We're just hoping that with our liaison teams being effective, linkages by a very clear protocol -- you compare what was done in the 1970s, when the council said, "Give us three names and we'll choose any of them," no rationale for what the names should be except that there should be diversity.
You look at the protocol they now have to go through, it's a much more sophisticated form of representational appointment than any other system, I think, of public appointments across the province, one that should be looked at for hospitals and others, for instance. I think there are always going to be tensions but, on the whole, this system has worked remarkably well for the last 27 years or so and I think, with the reforms we're talking about, as we get through these tough periods, people will look back at this as a heyday of our expansion of the community college system.
The Chair: There's just less than four minutes.
Mr Daniel Waters (Muskoka-Georgian Bay): The first question, Richard, I'd like to touch on just briefly, if you could give us some indication, is the fee for service, such as WCB and Jobs Ontario Training, UI. Is that a growth part of the college system, where there are other parts of government actually paying into the college system?
Mr Johnston: It's been a huge part of the system for years. You have three sides to the colleges, and people always concentrate on the post-secondary side, and the statistics we've been giving you are all to do with post-secondary. Besides the 135,000 or so students coming into post-secondary this year, there are almost 800,000 people who come in on a part-time basis, not for mostly educational entertainment but for upgrade. They're very practically minded. On top of that, you have training courses and some colleges are much more involved in that than others. George Brown is highly involved in that, for instance. Some of the federal cutbacks in the last couple of years have hurt that side very dramatically.
There is huge nervousness in the system about the role of OTAB and how that's going to affect the colleges and whether or not we'll continue to be sort of the prime apprenticeship deliverer and the kind of things we've had in the past. It's an area of very large insecurity at this point and already has had very severe impacts on the colleges like Fanshawe, Mohawk, George Brown and Algonquin. The ones that have the big training responsibilities have been hurt very hard in their budgets.
At the same time as that's true, there have been some new initiatives, some, like the ones I'm involved with around JobLink, which we hope will produce some new clientele for the colleges in an appropriate way and some of the initiatives you'll hear from ACAATO about, I hope, like Con-nect -- I hope they speak about that a fair amount with you -- that I think will position us magnificently for sectoral training initiatives that we've never taken before. I think there's good and bad news in that area.
Mr Waters: One of the things I heard when I sat reviewing WCB was the need of some of these -- and I was wondering how the college system is dealing with this -- the need for some of these people who, let's say, come off WCB -- because in rural and northern Ontario they have to travel great distances. They're not students; they have two or three kids at home; they have a wife at home. How indeed is the college system adapting to this new student who has special needs who doesn't have the ability necessarily to go through the system as fast or at times as slow as a regular student? Do you get involved with that?
Mr Johnston: We are dealing with it and as best we can. It's sort of a catch-up kind of situation at the moment. On the restructuring committee, one of the things we're looking at about that is flexible and compressed delivery options to allow people to move more quickly or more slowly through the system than our traditional post-secondary routes have allowed. We also hope there can increasingly be flexibility for injured workers and others in terms of some of those other kind of family supports.
Changes in tuition rates have worked against that. Some of the money we received to help people with disabilities come into the colleges has helped on the other side. There's a bit of a tradeoff there but it is a growing clientele in the sense of people coming wanting more generic skills, getting their post-secondary education as their major security in the economy is becoming the new phenomenon.
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Mr Waters: The other part is that I guess these people come in with different expectations too, I think, of the college system. They've been in the workforce and they want back as fast as they can. They have a family somewhere. They want to get back to that family and they want to get the education they need or the skills they need and get back there. Is there some sort of a system where we're getting into a bit more broad based about advising them what their options are so we make sure that indeed these people are getting back as fast as possible, especially these workers that ultimately would just as soon have been at their job all along -- get back to a job?
Mr Johnston: If they're coming through the training side, that's primarily handled by the training referral, whether it's UIC or whether it's WCB. If they're coming into post-secondary, then that's where prior learning comes in. We basically try to figure out how best to recognize what they already know so they don't have to study it again, and to design their programs in ways that can help them get through more quickly.
But some of our funding formula don't help that, some of the ways we organize our collective agreements don't help that, and we're trying to find ways under the restructuring committee to try to address some of those issues. It's a big challenge, especially with the numbers you're talking about. The relevancy of the system is indicated by the fact that 40% more people are coming now than came four years ago, five years ago. People want this kind of education.
The Chair: Mr Malkowski, we're out of time, I'm sorry.
Mr Malkowski: My only comment for the public record was congratulations on the hard work and the leadership for COR.
The Chair: Mr McGuinty.
Mr Dalton McGuinty (Ottawa South): Let me begin by welcoming Richard and his colleagues to our committee. I have a series of questions and comments I'd like to make concerning COR and our college system in Ontario today. All is not well, contrary to what some would have us believe, and I'm sure all of our deputants would recognize that.
There are some problems, but let me at the outset state that our college system during the past quarter century and then some has served Ontarians very, very well and I think it continues to show great promise. It's meeting some unprecedented challenges at the present time, but all is not well.
Let me begin by touching on the governance issue. That is a very controversial issue. Many friends of our colleges have contacted me personally to raise the concerns connected with the proposed change to the means by which we appoint or place people on our volunteer boards which help run our colleges. Just so committee members understand, at the present time there are 16 members sitting on our college boards. Four of those are internal members, as Richard I think made reference to earlier.
There was a proposal put out by the Council of Regents. I guess it was the governance committee in particular which said that we were going to in effect introduce a quota system, that we were going to have three persons who will be defined by -- I guess one would be a labour representative, one would be a disabled person, the other would be an aboriginal person and these persons would be elected to the board.
As I've already said, this is very controversial. The criticisms that have been levelled at this by governors in particular was that this was usurping the traditional role of college boards to choose board members that best met their needs as they saw them and as they defined them. I think one of the reasons our colleges have succeeded so well during the past quarter century and then some is because they have had that flexibility at the local level to determine what their needs were and to make inroads towards meeting them.
The second concern raised with this approach to changing the governance was that this was a constituency model, and there's a very real concern that if I'm elected by a particular group I will see that my accountability is owed to that particular group. After all, they're the people that sent me, and I will not look to the broader public interests, the college interests, the community interests.
Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but all college boards but one are opposed to this notion. Then there were the unfortunate -- and I use that word advisedly -- unfortunate comments of Mr Turk who indicated that he felt those who were presently sitting -- I don't want to paraphrase him. I have a copy of his letter which he sent to Bev Marshman who was then the chair of the governance committee. He said that, "While the gender, race and ethnic makeup of boards of governors have become more reflective of Ontario, the boards continue to represent a small and unrepresentative upper social economic elite within their communities. In other words, although there are more women and more visible minorities, they are remarkably like the white men they have replaced."
That sparked a flurry of correspondence and calls to my office, particularly from the many, many persons from minority groups, disabled persons, who felt insulted by Mr Turk's comments; who felt that with one broad swoop he had labelled them as being there as merely tokenistic and not there to serve in their best capacity.
The minister, quite rightly, has distanced himself from Mr Turk's comments. I believe you, Richard, have distanced yourself from Mr Turk's comments. The other factor that made this so controversial was the unseemly squabble at Conestoga, where that community college, using what it felt was its best judgment in terms of people who it wanted to have appointed to its board, saw those recommendations rejected.
I want to allow you an opportunity to comment on this. I think it's important that we clear the air. Where is this at? Will the governors be given a chance to speak to this again? It's over in the minister's office, I understand. Is he going to kick it back to COR or is he going to come up and say: "Bang, this is it. This is what we're going to do." Could I have your comments, please?
Mr Johnston: Let me start off with the general and I'll let Jim speak for himself as is our wont in the Council of Regents. We let our people speak for themselves.
First, in terms of the report -- start at the end and work back. The minister doesn't have it as yet. When he gets it, as is normal, it's his report to do with as he pleases. We will encourage him to release this as quickly as possible to the system. The reason it isn't ready yet is because so many revisions were made to the report as part of the consultation because, although it's been depicted as otherwise, it was part of about a three-year process as is outlined, I think, fairly well for you in the report put before you today and we were wanting input.
Although the boards were fairly firmly opposed to the recommendation put forward in number one, others thought we had backed off very important principles of constituency representation in the approach that we'd taken, and in the end we've come up with what we think is a fairly good response to the overall issues of getting at the linkages to the community that we wanted without having to go down the route that we put forward in the first recommendation. But that will have to wait in detail for the minister to release it.
We think the system will be very happy with the document that we do finally come out with, and their input has been very helpful to us from all the different stakeholders.
I should say that constituency representation on our boards is not new. I really want to emphasize that. We have had labour seats on our boards from the beginning of time, recognizing that in fact you would not get representation from labour on those boards, you'd just get business representation and you wouldn't have the two sides of the market on those boards. That constituency seat has been there for a long time and the process we use now for getting people on there is one which just started around 1987.
The other thing I'd say is that the move towards real constituency representation of internal representatives with the announcements by Mr Sorbara and the subsequent Minister of Colleges and Universities under the last government are the major moves towards constituency representation that we've seen during the period of the college's history, and we think are generally speaking being fairly well accommodated within the boards themselves out there. It would be interesting to hear their views when they come forward. I think there are some frustrations but not that many of them.
We believe that what we were doing was trying to bridge some gaps in our own council, and to put out some positions that would provoke discussion and get us some response. We managed to do that brilliantly and had lots of responses on that, and we've actually learned a lot from the variety of groups, including external groups to our system, about how best to do some of the things we have been trying to do. As I say, I think the report will be a useful one to the overall system. Unfortunately, it wasn't interpreted in that fashion.
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It's not our policy to talk about our circumstances with individual boards in a public forum. These are difficult things to do. You can never talk about them adequately because they are all things that revolve around personality as well as public policy, and it's hard sometimes to extricate all those things. I think we have stated in public a number of times that we regret that the communication failures that happened around Conestoga did take place and we're glad the process finally was re-established. I thank especially the work of Ted and Diane, who became the liaison team to try to sort that sort of thing out with the board. I think it was very helpful, so I thank both.
Jim wants to make a comment in terms of the quote, and then Ted.
Dr Turk: I'd actually like to address several of the points you raised. The document to which you made reference at the beginning of your remarks was a discussion paper that the Council of Regents put out. It was not a statement of our intentions as to what to do but rather a number of suggestions that had come through the council that were sent out to the college system for discussion.
The part on constituency representation was not a suggestion that different constituencies would elect representation, but rather to say that if indeed it was the intention to have aboriginal representatives on every board, it would probably make sense to have the aboriginal community within that college's catchment area nominate the person. So it was to involve the constituency in the nomination process rather than to have the people sitting around the board table generate the nomination for the aboriginal community or for the black community or for General Motors or whomever.
As we talked about constituency models, there were some of us who favoured a full-fledged constituency model, as OTAB is. There were others who favoured no constituencies. What was put out there was a compromise of sorts that identified certain traditionally underrepresented constituencies on boards.
While you made reference to many disabled people phoning you, the fact of the matter is there are only 12 disabled people on all the college boards. That's been a relatively recent phenomenon as a result of the council trying actively to encourage more representation, not only of people with disabilities but of people with linkages to organizations of people with disabilities so that when that individual is sitting there on the college board, they can be a real link to another part of the community.
This was described as usurping the role of boards, although it's never been the role of boards to make appointments. The role of boards has been to forward nominations, along with other sources, to the Council of Regents.
If you go back to the opening quotation from the 1972 guideline to governors, the intention then was as it is now. Had the Council of Regents a decade ago not become serious about gender representation, the pattern of only three or four women on each board would likely have continued. In a sense, the Council of Regents said: "We are going to assure that there's gender parity on every board. That's a public policy decision that we've made."
So there's always been the council playing a role, trying to enact the intention that was stated back in 1972. After it's been done it's been reasonably well accepted, and boards, I think without exception, would indicate they're richer today as a result of our insistence, not theirs, that there be gender parity.
With regard to the constituency model, you were suggesting in your remarks, if I'm not wrong, that the danger of such a model is that people won't represent the broader interest, they'll only represent their own constituency. But surely, I would ask you, when you think of passing legislation or voting on bills, you don't simply vote as the member for the people who've elected you; you also try to think of what's good for Ontario. It's not a delegated system that we have in our legislatures.
The constituency model, as Richard indicated, is also not new. Not only have we had labour nominees on boards for a number of years because there was an underrepresentation of people from a working-class background on boards, but we've also had a number of other constituencies represented. There's virtually always a representative nominated by General Motors on the Durham College board. It makes sense. Durham is primarily the Oshawa area and General Motors is the major employer in that community. It would be crazy not to have a representative.
You don't have the board sit around and say, "We'll pick the person from General Motors." They meet with the president of General Motors and other senior officials and look for someone who will be a real link with the corporation. The same with Sault College and Algoma Steel, or the Big Three auto makers and St Clair College and so forth.
It was an extension of that, not to mention the practice that was set up under the previous government of having internal constituencies represented. It was putting out that idea: Is that a way to build better linkages? That's really the objective here, to build better linkages between the diversity of the communities.
With regard to my own comments which have been cited so often, I first find it somewhat interesting that a private letter to the chair of the governance committee assumed such public significance, though I guess in this day and age one has to assume that anything one puts in writing is likely to appear in public. But again, the claim I was making, whether one likes the choice of words or not, was a claim that I think is factually correct: There is a serious underrepresentation of certain socioeconomic statuses on boards and an overrepresentation of others.
If you go back to the 1972 language, it talks about "drawn from a variety of occupations, interests and backgrounds, and should be representative of any large proportion of citizens of distinctive national origin, race, religion or economic status." There has been traditionally, and continues to be in my view, an underrepresentation of people from a middle and lower socioeconomic status on boards, even though the bulk of the student body comes from those backgrounds. That was the intention I was trying to articulate.
Perhaps I'll just leave it there. I'm not going to make a comment on a specific college, for the reasons Richard indicated. It gets rather difficult, although Ted may have something useful to add to that.
Mr Hargreaves: The reference to the Conestoga College issue: I too of course cannot reference individuals but can reference process. I was a former chair of a small college called Canadore in a city called North Bay before I went on council, so I understand the tension between the two bodies and the sincerity with which nominations are made from those colleges. In this particular case, as our chair referred to, he regretted the communication difficulties, and I think that's what happened.
However, I have to say that I think council genuinely tried to respond the best we could under our chair's advice. With his initiative, three or four of us went down, met with the executive and the president literally over a pizza to try to come to some understanding of the difficulties that had come about.
To my satisfaction at least, I regret the pain that they felt they went through. I think we do have a resolution and success was achieved, but it was achieved because of our commitment to collaboration and inclusion. Simply, we went down and we heard them out and found what the problem was and tried to be a part of the solution. I think that's the best we can ask in complicated times with difficult issues.
Mr McGuinty: All right. I don't have time to properly respond and I don't want to engage in a debate. If you don't sense this, and I think that in your heart of hearts you do, there is a perception out there that a great deal is being imposed from the Council of Regents on the various colleges, located as they are throughout the province. There is a perception that there is a concerted effort to centralize, and people are asking, "How in the name of God did we run for the first 25 years without all of these indispensable, innovative approaches being brought to our colleges," whether it's CSAC, prior learning assessment, reform of the governance methods used at our colleges; just so that's on the record.
I want to talk about general education. General education is another controversial area. This has been raised with me, particularly by faculty in technical programs. As you're aware, there's no additional class time devoted, no additional money. As they see it, they are being asked to give up some of their class time, core programs, for instance electronics, in order to devote time to general education.
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I'm not arguing that general education in and of itself is not a good thing. I am just saying, when we've reduced core programs from 30 hours to 23 hours per week, and now it's going to drop to 20 hours per week, I'm very concerned, as they are, whether we are going to be able to transmit to them the necessary core elements that they're going to need to get that job.
Now, advisory committees have expressed some concern about this as well. Students have told me that -- remember, we're talking about students who are, what, 26 years of age now? That's the average age. They see it as paternalistic. They sign up and they say: "This is what I want as a core program. Get me this thing." We've even got a case in Ottawa where, as you probably are aware, we've got a student suing our college because he felt the program was deficient. It didn't deliver on what he thought it had promised to deliver, so breach of contract essentially.
Maybe just so committee members understand what we're talking about, we're talking about gen ed in the booklet here called General Education in Ontario's Community Colleges put out by CSAC, January 1994. It describes some of the goals for gen ed. "Aesthetic appreciation: understand beauty, form, taste and the role of arts in society. Civic life: understand the meaning of freedoms, rights and participation in community and public life. Cultural understanding, understand the cultural, social, ethnic and linguistic diversity of Canada and the world," and so on.
Now, those are good things in and of themselves. I'm not disputing that. But if I'm in there to get my welder's certificate or whatever and I've paid my money as a student, I'm not sure I want my hours to be reduced in order to inject general education. I wonder if you could respond to that and tell me where we are, please. What's the status of gen ed in our colleges today?
Mr Johnston: Sure. Let me start off at the beginning and move through to the end. The reforms that we're involved with are not Council of Regents generated. They were generated out of Vision 2000, sponsored by Lyn McLeod as minister, bought into by the whole system, signed off by all the management of the system, boards of governors included, and by the general public, that the reforms we're now moving on should be moved on, and with some precision the Council of Regents was asked in those documents to take a role.
All that's happened since is that we've been assuming those roles. But they're not easy roles. It's easy to talk about reform, but once you start to do it and you start to change and you do it in a time when there's not much money around -- and I buy that premise that you're saying entirely -- it creates an extra tension above and beyond the tensions that we have.
But that need to change the system after 25 years was accepted by everybody. There was a lot that was good there that we have to preserve, but there were some things that we have to change and, yes, a number of those were centralist kinds of things.
Except that even if you look at standards, we're not talking about standardization. We're talking about outcome standards, and curriculum control is still local. If you talk about general education, it's guidelines that then get operated at a local basis. It's not being inflicted from above. Not only that, but the people who are doing this are all people out of the system, out of those colleges, out of businesses all around the province. So it's not an arbitrary thing the government is doing; it's very much part of where the system has wanted to go. But yes, it's difficult. Believe me, I know how difficult it is.
In terms of general education, I think it's a particularly difficult thing to move back to the rhetoric of William Davis, because if you go back and read that first speech and the speeches that he made afterwards, the move from the technical institutes into post-secondary institutes, where general education was part of what post-secondary is about, was part of the premise, and some of the language from those days talked about 50% of what we do being general education. That got eroded with funding problems over the years to being virtually non-existent in some colleges and about 15% to 18% in other colleges.
What's happening at the moment is a move to try to put some of that back in but exactly at the most difficult time, as you say, because there was the reduction of programs. So I think it is particularly difficult in some areas, like the heavy technical side, to see how you do that, and I think we have to find some really creative solutions at the local level to know how to do that appropriately.
If you talk to people at Cambrian and you talk to people at some of the colleges that have found solutions, I think some of the colleges that are having difficulty should learn from some of those best practices about how to do it without losing the maximum number of hours that you've already alluded to. We have been trying to give as much flexibility in timing to bring this about as we could. We were asked by cabinet to actually do this within one year. We've basically now said to the colleges, "Give us our plan for how you do this." We recognize that there are difficulties.
Even with that, over 80% of the college programs have managed to bring it in, so it means that in 20% we haven't done it yet. We can work together on plans to do it. But some entire colleges have all their programs involved, so therefore I think there are ways to learn from some of those best practices, and over this next period of time, we intend to go out and find out who's done it well and try to share that with some of the ones that are having difficulty managing at this stage.
If we can't do it without more money, and it may very well be the case, then that has to go back to governments, which with their shrinking resources, have to decide whether or not they can continue to invest in that reform. That won't be our decision; we're just doing what cabinet asks us to do.
When I say "we" at this point, I'm speaking as the acting director of CSAC, not as the COR board, which has not made one comment at this point about any matter coming out of the standards and accreditation council. We have not written one commentary about whether or not their suggestions have been good or bad. We have left that authority with them, because as I said at the outset, we want them to be as independent as possible in this process.
I think the outcome of it in the end will be a very positively enhanced system, but we're going through some pretty tough times in making it happen at this stage because we can't throw money at it like we did in the 1960s when we got started.
The Chair: Since Mr Johnston only took 40 minutes of his hour at the beginning, would it be the wish of the committee just to do one more rotation of five minutes each caucus?
Mr McGuinty: Yes.
The Chair: All right. Then we'll start with the third party, Ms Cunningham.
Mrs Cunningham: Since we've had a few history lessons here this afternoon, I should tell you that the minister sent a letter to the committee describing the responsibilities of the Council of Regents and the policy objectives that you serve. It was interesting, because in the very beginning the determination of college program offerings, of course, was the responsibility of the council, and it was to undertake a study of the post-secondary and adult education needs of the community. It went on to talk about the responsibility in producing graduates in technical education.
If we were to take a look at the success of the colleges, I don't think a 50% dropout rate is successful. It's obviously a concern of Vision 2000, and I would ask you to respond to that, as well as how you feel the training needs of each community are being presented, either to yourself or the colleges specifically. We know the engines that will drive the North American economy are in the area of health-related skills, certainly food services, and technology and communications. We're all pretty sure that those are the main engines.
I think the public wants young people to graduate where the needs are, not only in the big picture but in their own small communities. So, Richard, could you address the concerns that you've got with regard to whether we are meeting those training needs and then what you will be recommending about this 50% dropout rate.
Mr Johnston: Let me start with the dropout rate, if I could, because we were both on the select committee which used to look at the figures for the high school system. I think our figures are just as misleading as those figures that used to be thrown around by a certain ex-Toronto Star expert on such things back in those days.
Our 50% figure, or 40% or 35% -- you can get a range of figures that are put in for dropping out of the system --
Mrs Cunningham: This was the Vision 2000, wasn't it?
Mr Johnston: Yes -- unfortunately doesn't distinguish between a number of things, some people leaving courses to take work without actually bothering to get their certificate -- because as I recall, for instance, in a journalism course in Centennial, they were told by the Metroland newspapers in the area: "We'll hire you now for $200. If you finish your second year, we'll hire you for $200. How do you want to come? Do you want your job now or not?" So people would jump out.
I don't know if that's a bad failure of the system or if it's just lack of coordination with an employer about trying to get the full range of skills or whether it was a good thing.
I think we need much better analysis about the dropout situation. I think we get a lot of people who leave the system and come back part-time. I think that 800,000 they talk about is a lot of people who've decided they'll go back, take their work, and they'll come back in on a part-time basis. They haven't really left. But we have no statistical basis at this point of following them. I've got a feeling the success is better than it looks.
The reason I say that, Dianne, is that if we were doing a really bad job, why would they keep applying to us in such enormous numbers when there are so many more private options around these days than there used to be? As I say, they're coming to us in droves, whereas the university system is not essentially growing this year at all. If you compare us over the last five years, it's a big, big difference in terms of the interest.
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My sense is that we've had some enormous success. On the other hand, as we've brought people in more and more, I'm not sure we've had the resources or the remedial capacity to assist them, or the PLA capacity to find their strengths as well as their weaknesses to help them choose some of the things. Hopefully, some of the reforms we're involved in will adjust that. But I'm not really clear at this stage on how difficult our situation is. As soon as the recession deepened, the retention rates rose -- interesting. There is some connection to the availability of jobs.
On the other side, I still think that the best connectors for us are our local advisory committees in terms of what the real jobs are in the local area. I still believe that. I think that will be enhanced at the provincial level through business people who are involved in our College Standards and Accreditation Council. I think the local training boards and --
Mrs Cunningham: Are you talking about the OTAB now?
Mr Johnston: Yes. I think those local boards, plus the provincial board, I hope, will make this a major focus of their statistical research. It certainly has been part of the presumption of what they will do up to this point, and we will be intricately tied into that to make sure that the colleges stay as relevant as they have been over the course of the last 25 years.
Mrs Cunningham: If I can just add a couple of things, I certainly didn't ask to have you come before this committee because I was looking for weaknesses. I had you come because I think there are lot of challenges in the system.
Mr Johnston: There are.
Mrs Cunningham: I think the real losers if we don't do things well are the young people who don't have jobs. I'm asking questions because I'm looking for solutions and I want you to do a good job. I personally think one of the criticisms -- and perhaps you could close on this -- of the OTAB is that they have gone from some 48 advisory boards down to 25 and may not in fact meet the needs of each local college, because there are so many -- you know, when you're in there working for a college, you want young people to be trained for your own little rural area. Local business people in Timiskaming want you to talk about what they do best and to keep their young people as far as possible, whether this be fair or not, in their community so their businesses can survive.
I think that may be a problem; I'm not sure. If it is, I don't think the colleges can afford to wait around for some big board, big bureaucracy to tell them what to do. I'm just wondering, if that's the case, what are you doing about it now? We don't want to talk about doom and gloom here, but we need to know what the kids need to know to get a job this year. Is there some other backup to this?
Mr Johnston: It will be great when the presidents arrive actually to talk to you, because I think they'll be able to give you good anecdotal evidence of how the colleges have continued to find creative ways to bring in their local business partners, and labour partners often, to assist them more creatively. I've seen a whole slate of special forums that have been set up to come in and address the issues of local planning needs at this point.
I hope that increasingly they will be planning to affect the OTABs more. As you know, we don't even have a seat on the provincial OTAB. With a billion-dollar investment from the province in this area of applied learning, it's of real concern to us that we don't have that seat at the table in that structure.
Talking about the French needs, they're already highly underrepresented in training needs. Our big concern is, how do we get the college of the south, which represents the area of 16 English-speaking colleges, on to any board of OTAB to be able to have any kind of impact? Is that all just going to be left out?
We have enormous challenges in terms of the integration of what was an enormous investment by this province in a whole new level of education in the 1960s with the reorganization of the labour market training approach in the 1990s. There will be a lot of bugs to iron out, an enormous number.
Mrs Cunningham: Can I just make a comment? I want to thank you for that, but you know, we were very concerned about the lack of representation on the OTAB board for education in general. I'm glad you mentioned it, because I really think you are a key training element. I don't understand why government moved the way it did in that regard. I thank you for sharing your concerns with us.
Ms Margaret H. Harrington (Niagara Falls): It's very good to hear from Ms Cunningham that this is a positive exercise in trying to meet the challenges that face us.
I was very curious also about the French-language college extension in the south. I'll be looking forward to hearing more about that very shortly. The announcement will be coming.
In your remarks, you made the astounding remark that in the past four years your enrolment has gone up 35% and you have been doing that educating with 25% less. Obviously, that's reflective of the private sector, business, in the last four years as well as many of the public institutions. If you have any secrets as to how this is done without compromising quality, maybe you could make some of those remarks, or maybe it will come out over the next four days. That will be very interesting. It can be done and it is being done in various sectors, but there certainly are secrets, and I think probably one them is partnership, working together and listening to the front-line people as to what is important and what can be not so important and let go of. I certainly would like you to share those.
I have one further little question, and that is about the prior learning assessment. I'm wondering if there is a per-student cost to that and if that's a problem, say, with the student who comes to one college and is assessed and then does not actually end up being a student there. If there is a figure that's a cost per student for that, maybe you could let us know.
Mr Johnston: Sure. Two things: First, it has not been done without some pain, and I think there are many in our system who would argue that it is dangerously close to affecting quality, if it hasn't already affected quality, in the system to do that. But as a president said to me the other day, we feel obligated to meet the public need, and when the people are banging at the doors to come in you try to find every space you possibly can even if that's economically unwise. Presidents will be able to speak to this pressure on their budgets a lot more than I can.
But our partnerships with all the groups have really helped us get through this period in ways that I don't think we could have if we hadn't had them. I just think of the work we did with students on tuition fees and the work we've done with the union about how to use prior learning assessment, because it flies in the face of our collective agreement, which is quite rigid in terms of what we call the release from actual work, which is a very rigid system, and we need flexibility in terms of releasing people to do prior learning assessments. We've worked out a very good approach to trying to work that out this year, to make sure that reform gets a good test.
But I would say that -- just to give the system a major plug, if I could -- hospitals are often used as an example of people who've really responded well to the cost reductions. They've done that well, and I give them that, but we've not only had the same percentage reduction, we've actually increased our clients by 35%; it will be 40% this year. I mean, just think about that. That is phenomenal, and it is really putting attention on you. You wonder why it's difficult to move on these reforms now. When you've got that kind of a world putting pressure on people, it's very hard to move the yardsticks in a fundamental way like we're trying in a couple of these areas. To understand the difficulties we're facing, it's because we have been so responsive, and I just hope we start to get more credit for it than we have as a system.
Ms Harrington: Today, we're starting to.
Mr Johnston: The one thing I'd say about the fees is that there is an actual cost of undertaking a prior learning assessment; I don't know if you want to speak to it or if you want me to. It's a formula which we've now had approved by the government. It makes sure that you're not encouraging people just to come in and test all the time to see if they've got something rather than taking courses.
There is a direct relationship to the cost of actually taking a course. The key to doing this province-wide rather than college by college is that you can then take your assessment to any college and you don't have to go through it again. If you move to Seneca's region from Niagara, you've got the capacity to carry that with you. I think that will be a major saving for people in the future.
This is the first year that we're actually doing it in a big way, so we don't have any statistics of the demand at this stage. We certainly haven't been marketing it. If we market it and get more people coming into the system, we're not just sure if that wouldn't push us over the edge in terms of our capacity to deliver.
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Ms Jenny Carter (Peterborough): Welcome. I certainly think the Council of Regents is working pretty well. I just want to ask you a question about your relationship with universities. I know that there has been a coming together there and it's now much more possible for students to move around and build up something that suits them from the offerings that both groups have. But it seems to me that universities do have a different function. They have a sort of responsibility to the wider world of knowledge that transcends their immediate time and space and they don't have quite the same commitment to being job-related, although I know that there are aspects of universities' work which are much more job-related than others.
Of course, traditionally the universities have been very autonomous, and I'm sure that they're very anxious to maintain that. I just wondered whether you see a closer relationship still or whether you see that autonomy being safeguarded, and how you see the two systems finally meshing.
Mr Johnston: I would love us to be more closely allied. I think there are huge structural problems with doing it because of the autonomy of the universities and I think it's a terribly difficult political issue for anybody to try to take that on from this venue here, but I do think we've got to try to work those things out.
I would also say that with the reorganization of the Ministry of Education and Training into a much broader, all-encompassing kind of body, some of my earlier predilections about having a sort of post-secondary council I now put into question because I think this may be the time when we need particular advice being given to the minister because the ministry itself is now so broad in its interests. The particular interests of the secondary system, elementary system and perhaps child care, as well as colleges and universities, I think probably need particular voices coming into them at this stage.
While we need the collaboration, the thing I would hate to see happen is that the lost jewel not become a phenomenon. I really think the colleges have been the quietest part of our system over the years and yet have had the greatest impact on the economy. I'm absolutely convinced of that now after the three years here at the Council of Regents, and I would hate to see that lost in terms of a voice for them if we just tried to put ourselves totally on the university side because, quite frankly, I think we would be dominated and that would be --
Ms Carter: So you should stay quite distinct.
Mr Johnston: I think distinct but in great partnership is the way I would like to see it.
Mr McGuinty: I'm concerned about what's going to happen when the social contract is behind us. We've had some work stoppages in the past. In 1994 or 1995, or in the context of a recession, when we all recognize that a skilled and educated workforce is an integral component in job creation, we don't replace that time for 500,000 students. If they're out for three weeks, they don't make up the time. But they're paying their fees; I understand as well they don't get a refund on their fees. Do they have a seat at the bargaining table, and who speaks for students, some consumers, important consumers in this issue? I guess your thoughts generally --
It seems to me as well that we've got an average workload now for faculty -- is it 15 hours per week? That's class time, to be fair, give or take, I guess. It seems to me the only way we're going to be able to accommodate those increased numbers is to have some flexibility there. Are we setting ourselves up for a protracted work stoppage? Are cornflakes going to hit the fan and is there going to be a major, major problem?
Mr Johnston: I wish it was cornflakes that are going to hit. I have the same fears about what we're going to be facing in the next little while. I think that our history of poor labour relations during the mid-l980s, when we as a council were rightfully taken on for that by Walter Pitman and others in terms of the way I think we'd been operating, has bred a situation where we have too much rigidity in the way we approach things. I think the work we've been doing over this last period of time, of bringing these partners to all the tables we possibly can, whether it's students or unions, whomever, has created much better understanding and collegiality, if I can use that term, than we've had in the past.
But the structural impact of the social contract exit I think is the most challenging thing we've ever had to face and I can't say that I'm not worried about there being some work stoppage as we try to work our way through that. All I can tell you is our tables are there and people are operating as effectively as possible.
Under the law of the land, of course, consumers and clients do not have a role at a bargaining table. It doesn't matter whether it's the consumers of General Electric or the consumers of education. What we do have, though, are a lot of tables where the leaders of OCCSPA, the student council association for the province, and OPSEU, academic and support, actually sit down together. They get to know each other and the interests of each other well.
It is my hope that the kind of tone that's developed over this last number of years at those tables will help us all work our way through this thing without the normal name-calling and alienation that takes place on all sides, because I agree with you that we can't afford the hiatus.
My view is that we have to massively increase the percentage of our population that gets this level of education and find the most creative ways possible to do that. Perhaps in that expansion there can be the job security that the workers want, as well as dealing with the cost-effectiveness issues that we've been trying to deal with these last few years. It's going to be tough, spot on. We can talk about governance, we can talk about standards, that kind of thing; the big issue for us is going to be how we manage to deal with the ending of the social contract.
Mr McGuinty: I don't raise this issue about students having a place at the bargaining table to be flippant -- I know you didn't take it that way -- but we're not talking about producing bumpers here or hot dogs or computer chips, we're talking about education.
I think employers may get themselves into a frame of mind where they say, "Well, they're out and we'll leave them out because we can't afford to pay them that," and where the employee group may decide, "We're out and we're staying out."
But I would argue that it is never, never in a student's interest to be out of school. I don't know if there's anybody within the system -- it doesn't mean we can't develop something where they can play a role, but at the present time I see that as a deficiency.
I just want to end on this note: the reputation of our colleges. Essentially, it's a good and solid reputation, but still when I talk to parents, they will say, "I'd prefer that they go on to university" -- doctor, lawyer, engineer, dentist, whatever. High school counsellors are all university-trained. They seem to be focusing on post-secondary education; they acquaint that with university.
Last week I met with the University of Toronto Faculty Association saying we have too many students with us who should be in a college, in a milieu in which they would thrive. Now we're starting to see a bit of a reversal in the trend: We're seeing university graduates go to college.
Mr Bradley: So they can get a job.
Mr McGuinty: So they can pick up some of the critical skills they feel are essential to obtaining employment. What are we not doing or what could we be doing to remedy that? I guess the long and the short of it is, I'm not sure we're streaming our students after high school effectively.
Mr Johnston: I think that the schools-college committee will be making a report which I think is a practical approach to that rather than the pie-in-the-sky approach that maybe could be taken, in my view, in terms of the enormity of what we have before us. It is really building on the articulations that are presently out there as good examples of how to do this. I think we should be doing an awful lot more celebration of what the colleges have actually done to the economy and the social fabric of the province of Ontario.
When you add up those numbers I gave you, that's over a million people per year who are involved in a college in some way or another in the province of Ontario, one out of 10 people, one out of six adults. That is really quite staggering in terms of its impact already. My sense is that this really needs a very positive boost.
The difficulty is that if universities decide they want to send us that group of people you talked about, Seneca will tell me that there is no place to put them except on top of the building at this stage because of the numbers that we've been accommodating as it is. We have to find other ways, through distance education, through allowing people to learn at home, in the factories, to be able to manage this, because I think the majority of our population needs this level of education, not the minority that it's been for the last 27 years or so at this stage.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr Johnston. We would like to thank all of you for your appearance before the committee this afternoon: Ms Dubois, Mr Romulus, Mr Hargreaves and Mr Turk. Thank you, as always, Mr Johnston.
Mr Johnston: It's been fun to be back on this side of the table.
The Chair: The committee will stand adjourned now until 10 o'clock tomorrow morning.
The committee adjourned at 1620.