It is for this reason that the announcement in the recent federal budget that Ottawa will spend $75 million a year to establish “a new organization to support skills development and measurement in Canada”3 – a skills lab –struck many as a much-needed breakthrough. One commentator argued that the skills lab proposal is “a welcome addition to the current skills debate in Canada” because it “identifies the critical questions we must seek to ask and answer, and acknowledges what we do not yet know.” The proposal “has the potential to serve as an invaluable complement, coordinator and clearinghouse for these efforts to highlight the best ideas and to develop and disseminate the best solutions.”4

In order to successfully implement the skills lab proposal, a number of questions will need to be answered – including questions about what it will measure and how, about the right mix of descriptive and experimental research, and about how it will fit into the complex network of actors and agencies that are already active in this policy landscape. More critical than these, however, is the question of governance – and it is on this question that this paper will focus.  It is the skills lab’s governance structure that will ultimately determine how successful it will be.

As others have already recognized, “if an appropriate governance structure is not established, it is impossible to develop the kind of LMI system we need.”5 This is true in large part because of the inescapable fact that labour market policies and the information that underpins them unfold in Canada in the context of intersecting federal-provincial-territorial jurisdiction. As a result, “a higher level of co-operation and coordination among governments is thus now required to make sure that Canadians get the LMI they need and deserve. And this will require making sure that the LMI system has the appropriate governance structure.”6

The starting point for the development of an appropriate governance structure is the recognition that the skills lab cannot be a solely federal initiative. For the skills lab to succeed, provinces and territories – the primary policy actors in the field of skills training and development – must not simply be consulted; they must actively participate in designing, mandating and overseeing it from the outset.

In the absence of some quick and creative thinking about how Ottawa can co-design and co-govern institutions jointly with the provinces and territories, the skills lab will never live up to expectations. It will inevitably founder on the same jurisdictional rocks as previous well-intentioned but poorly conceived federal initiatives in the area of skills development – an area that is hardly an exclusively federal responsibility.

The skills lab, therefore, should be seen not solely as an opportunity to operate as a laboratory for skills development and measurement but as an experiment in the development of a more mature approach to federal-provincial institutional co-governance in Canada. A model of federal-provincial-territorial “co-ownership” of the skills lab would not only improve its chances for success, but could serve as an innovative, practical model for overcoming some of the recurring frictions that Canada’s federal system can create.