Madam Speaker, earlier an NDP member made the point that we are dealing with a patchwork of things in the federal system. He is quite right.
It seems to me that we are trying to focus far more and have much less of a patchwork than we have had in the past.
I enjoyed what my friend for Gatineau had to say. Even though I support the legislation and I hope it will streamline many of these areas, one of the difficulties is it is an incredibly complex area. The member for Gatineau really brought this out.
For example, in the matter of employment, our colleagues from the Bloc mentioned unemployment particularly, but unemployment is related for example to the quality of education people received. People can be unemployed perhaps because as very young children they did not receive the appropriate care and when they became adults, they were unable to find continuous employment.
Unemployment and lifelong learning, which the member was talking about, are linked. We cannot predict what is going to happen in the workforce. There are changes in technology. People need to be retrained. The facilities are not there at that time. These are very often unpredictable things.
Literacy is a key feature of employment. The provisions for literacy in this new department and in all other federal departments and in all provincial departments are extremely important in terms of employment.
The member mentioned foreign credentials. English and French as first and second languages are extremely important. There are people in the trades and professions who are superbly qualified but lack one of the official languages. The teaching of English and French is an aspect of employment and is a factor in unemployment.
Very often these things are unpredictable. We simply do not know in 10 years' time what is going to cause a certain person to be employed or unemployed, or what sort of work the person might be doing. Years ago these things were much more predictable.
It is my hope that we are setting up a flexible, but still focused, department which would be better able not only to do things we know should be done now, but better able to adapt to the work and lifelong learning environment of the future.
I wonder if the member would care to comment on that aspect of the new department.