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I am delighted to welcome you to this informal lunch and thank you for coming today.
If it is possible to talk about tradition in the case of an organization as young as the Canadian Council on Learning, I would say that we have already established at least one wonderful tradition: our meetings with community leaders in the cities and regions where CCL’s Board of Directors holds its meetings. It seems to be part of this tradition that on every occasion Robert Giroux has to bear the burden of introducing me for the nth time, an unfortunate fate that he nevertheless accepts with great good humour and graciousness!
The last time our Board of Directors met in Montreal was in 2005. On that occasion, I spoke of Prosper Enfantin, the leader of the Saint-Simonian movement in France in the 19th century. Enfantin said:
“A society cannot survive without an ideal. Ideals are the springboard of humanity. Their absence leads to the suffocation of the society.”
For the last five years, the Canadian Council on Learning has been putting forward an ideal. Our ideal asserts that we will have greater success in bringing together the disparate groups and peoples that compose our society if we work together in the field of learning. Our ideal also sees learning of all kinds—formal, informal and completely casual—as front and centre among the concerns of society as a whole. Learning is the engine of prosperity, the guarantor of social cohesion and the basis of individual growth and development.
Was it Sophocles who said, “Live and learn”? In the four years since our last Board meeting here, I believe that in Quebec and across Canada there has come to be a much deeper understanding of the central role of learning in the future of societies.
Another truth, in another maxim: “The more you do, the more you can do.” The more accessible the opportunity to learn, the more significant the results. CCL is the only independent, pan-Canadian organization providing the analyses and information that allow Canadians to monitor advances in learning—an essential element if we want to improve our quality of life and strengthen our ability to compete globally.
In your CCL information kits, you will find detailed information on how CCL goes about the complex task of measuring and analyzing progress, as well as the gaps and barriers that still exist.
In this short talk, I do not want to go too deeply into Canada’s strengths and weaknesses in various aspects of learning, but I will be glad to answer questions on our performance and our major challenges.
Increasingly, CCL also supports the work in this field being done by our European partners, at the OECD and in South America. The Composite Learning Index (CLI), which was created in Canada by CCL, has now inspired a European version, the European Lifelong Learning Indicators (ELLI). ELLI will be launched this year, and will also be adapted by the OECD. Our recent book, Education, Training and Sustainability, a collaboration between the OECD, UNESCO and the Conference of Montreal, describes the challenges facing education and training in the context of the pressing issue of sustainability. It was released in Canada last week, at the International Economic Forum of the Americas here in Montreal, and in Europe in March, at the Canadian Embassy in Paris.
The world is in transition in so many ways, and the rate of change may appear daunting to many of us. But one of the welcome challenges is the growing shift from carbon energy to human energy. CCL’s work responds to the need for effective development of our country’s people, whether Canadian-born or recently arrived in this country.
CCL provides evidence for informed decisions by learners and potential learners, by educators and employers and by governments. Its contributions extend far beyond the short term: we want to build a long-term, sustainable advantage for our country.
My studies in medicine, with specialization in community health and epidemiology, instilled in me an abiding interest in the history of disease and humankind’s attempts to avert or control it. The influenza epidemic of 1918–19 claimed the lives of tens of millions of people around the world. At that time few resources were available to investigate the dynamics of how disease spreads and how to control that spread. Had countries had greater resources and a greater capacity to organize their response, the outcomes would have been far less devastating. Think back to the SARS crisis in 2003, which demanded investment of considerable resources in a short timeframe to prevent widespread transmission in Canada.
Our society makes valiant efforts to understand the origin of both transmissible and chronic diseases. We invest in agencies such as the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), which gathers information about health-care services and overall population health. Why? Because evidence is the key to understanding. Understanding is fundamental to tracking and controlling. And evidence and understanding are the scales on which different and opposing results hang in the balance.
Today, not to invest in generating such evidence and understanding is unthinkable, even in times of financial stringency: the stakes are too high.
Learning and health care differ in many respects, but they are equally significant to the destiny of societies. In both cases, the availability of evidence on which to base adequate information and independent analysis is pivotal to progress and successful outcomes. This is the reason why Canada cannot afford not to continue its investment in lifelong learning.
Many OECD member countries have adopted the goal of making learning a way to establish a competitive edge. Many have already created national programs to collect and disseminate information on learning that will improve their citizens’ quality of life.
In the era of the knowledge economy and the knowledge society, prosperity is the prerogative of countries and communities that have a culture of learning, that encourage their citizens to continue to learn and strengthen their skills and abilities throughout their lives.
Lifelong learning is not limited to formal education. Outside of the classroom, learning can take place at home, at work or in the community. In pressing for the creation of the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL), there were many national and regional organizations that wanted a catalyst for lifelong learning.
These organizations also felt the need for an independent organization able to provide Canadians with better information about the state of learning in this country, Canada’s performance in relation to other developed countries, and means that could be adopted in communities, schools, homes and workplaces to multiply learning opportunities, thereby guaranteeing the country’s prosperity and the future of its citizens and communities.
Every year, CCL assesses the strengths and weakness of post-secondary education in Canada. It works to strengthen workplace training and teaching, and assists Canadian parents to voice their concerns by carrying out regular studies on Canadians’ attitudes toward such things as homework and tutoring.
In these challenging economic times, it is the skills and abilities of our citizens that will make all the difference. This is precisely what CCL was created to support. Through its activities, CCL helps to ensure that Canadians’ skills correspond better to employers’ needs.
What is our main message at this time of economic crisis? Investment in human capital will distinguish successful societies from their competitors. Those economies that are supported by powerful learning systems will perform best in good times and in bad. CCL represents a key means for Canada to measure its progress in learning and, based on the evidence found, take the short- and long-term steps that will sustain our economic growth and our social fabric.
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