The most worrisome feature of Ontario's budget is its continuation of the
drastic imbalance between health care and education spending. Out of $109-
billion in proposed program spending, almost 40 per cent is committed to
health care and only 13 per cent to education.

Why is this worrisome? Because, in a recession, the highest spending priority
for provincial governments ought to be the retraining of the current work
force and the education of the future work force, so Canada emerges from
this recession with the most productive, competitive and highly skilled work
force in the world.

This is especially important for Ontario - the province with the largest work
force (more than seven million people) in the country - at a time when its
work force is being most severely hit by the current economic downturn.

According to Statistics Canada, "employment in Ontario fell by 35,000 in
February ... pushing the unemployment rate up to 8.7 per cent ... (more than
600,000 people out of work). ... Since last October, just over half of the
country's total employment losses have occurred in Ontario, well beyond the
province's 39 per cent share of the total working-age population.
Employment fell by 160,000 during this period, with the largest decreases in
manufacturing; business, building and other support services; and
construction."

As Ontario's economy contracts, should not the province be doing everything
in its power to facilitate as much as 10 per cent of its work force moving from
full-time and part-time employment to full-time and part-time education and
training? As young people graduate from Ontario's educational and training
institutions - and experience increasing difficulties in securing employment -
should not the province be doing everything in its power to provide them
with expanded opportunities for continued education and training leading to
more productive full-time employment down the road?

Such an education-based workplace revolution will require the co-operation
of businesses, unions, educational institutions and governments. In the case
of management and labour, this means making worker retraining and
education a much higher priority in collective bargaining agreements. But,
most important, provincial governments to whom our Constitution grants
primary jurisdiction over education must decide to make education and
training spending an even higher priority during recessionary times than
health-care spending.