The earliest examples of community-based training (CBT) in Canada are the co-operative efforts by early pioneer farmers to organize farm training and improvement through agricultural societies. While the first of these can be traced to origins in the late eighteenth century in Halifax, Quebec and Newark in Upper Canada (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.), the societies flourished after the Upper Canada legislature's decision in 1830 to offer them matching grants. As well as offering prizes for superior produce and livestock, they encouraged such things as essays on the cultivation of wheat.

With the earliest beginnings of urban industrial Canada after the War of 1812 came efforts at self-improvement by urban workers and craftsmen. One of the most enduring and popular vehicles for mutual education were a series of mechanics' institutes, which over the course of decades became a national network. The first Canadian institute, the Toronto Mechanics' Institute, was founded in Toronto on Christmas Eve, 1830.

The inherent power of educating the institutes' members was recognized both by its supporters and its enemies. "Masters have nothing to fear from the intelligence of their servants, if they render to their servants that which is just and equal," a clergyman told the Saint John, N.B. Institute in 1840, "and hereditary legislators have nothing to fear from a well-informed community, if they act worthily of the trust committed to their care, by the enactment of wise and generous laws."

Later in the century, the YWCA and YMCA began to offer job training and placement services. The YWCA, especially, ran courses in the complete range of occupations then open to women, including the skills then needed by domestic servants and clerical skills like phonography, stenography, and typing. In cities like Vancouver, the YWCA ran a large employment service for women; in 1910, the YWCA handled 3,000 applications from employers.

The YMCA, in the meantime, ran training and employment services for men out of work; in the depression of the 1870s, the Montreal YMCA trained and found jobs for hundreds of hard-to-place unemployed.

From the turn of the century to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Canada saw enormous levels of immigration that have never been equalled since. In 1912, for example, immigration levels peaked at around 400,000 a year, at a time when Canada's population was around eight million. In the late 1980s, by way of contrast, immigration levels averaged about 150,000/year, absorbed by a population of about 26 million. With such rapid change and dislocation came a wave of abuses in the employment market. One scandal of the period involved shady fee-charging employment agencies. Some of them paid kickbacks to employers to whom they sent job-seekers. The employers would hire the applicants and fire them on a pretext, so that the referring agency could collect the fee from another applicant.

In this context, non-profit employment services like the one run by the Vancouver YWCA were enabling people to avoid exploitative abuses. Trade unions in Victoria, Montreal and Quebec City were also running non-profit employment agencies for their unemployed members.

One solution to the social crises of the time involved what were called settlement houses. People who we would now describe as volunteer social workers went to live in low-income areas in places like Toronto, where the American Presbyterian settlement worker Sara Libby Carson opened Evangelia House in 1902. It was followed by others elsewhere in the country.

With the economic transformation of Canada in the first years of the century came the first large-scale involvement of the federal government in the job market. The Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education, which the Laurier government set up in 1910, filed a report that called for a national system of job training and employment bureaus. In response, Ottawa moved to fund provincially-run job training programs in agriculture in 1913, and in technical education in 1919. In general, we see in this period a takeover by government of activities that had been run by the non-profit sector: public expectations about who would provide services like job training and placement shifted to governments and boards of education.

This trend continued up through the Second World War. The founding of bodies like the federal Employment Service in 1919 bolstered government's control of the sector. By 1921-22, the new employment service had received 550,000 registrations of workers looking for jobs, 440,000 vacancies from employers, and had made 363,000 placements.

Job training through the Second World War and into the 1950s can be described as the Period of Big Institutions. Big institutions, corporate and military, dominated Canada's war effort, and big institutions dominated the postwar economy. The boom of the late 1940s and '50s fuelled public finances, making governments' fiscal choices easier, and unemployment rates that for years hovered around three per cent made employment strategies and training a less urgent priority than they would be before or after this period.

In the late 1960s, the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau began to add a system of arm's-length subsidies to a range of Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to its existing employment strategies, something we can describe as the revival of community-based training. The "grant boom", as journalist Sandra Gwyn described it, led to a new group of independent, government-funded agencies delivering employment services.

Taken from ONESTEP's "A History of Community-Based Training in Canada" (January 1998).