The federal government needs to step up its efforts to gather comprehensive labour market data as Ottawa struggles with a troubled temporary foreign worker program and labour shortage, according to former TD chief economist Don Drummond.

In an interview with CTV Power Play, Drummond said Ottawa is lacking reliable information to track labour market trends, particularly with regards to job vacancies.

“We know one side of it, we know who’s unemployed, thanks to the employment insurance program,” Drummond said. “We know very little about what job vacancies there could be, in an aggregate level … across occupations and the provinces.”

“Saying there is an engineering job somewhere in Ontario, or somewhere in Alberta, doesn’t really help anybody,” added Drummond, who published a report Wednesday for the Institute for Research on Public Policy on Ottawa’s deficient jobs data.

In question period Wednesday, the Opposition blasted the Conservatives for cutting funding to jobs data analysis after the Globe and Mail obtained an internal memo indicating spending on the gathering and sharing of such data has steadily decreased in recent years.

The revelation comes as the Conservatives face backlash over the controversial temporary foreign workers’ program. Opposition parties accused the government of slashing spending on labour market data at a time when they used alleged labour market shortages to justify a large uptick of foreign workers.

In response, Employment Minister Jason Kenney shot down suggestions that the government was cutting back, and announced that the government is launching a new a quarterly study on job vacancies and a new annual survey on wage rates.

Drummond said on Power Play that the temporary foreign worker program also highlights the need for such tracking.

“For these labour market opinions, you need to know what the prevailing local wage is -- we don’t know that,” Drummond said. “You ask an employer, you’ll get one answer, you ask a union, you’ll get a very different answer.”

Drummond is calling on the federal government to “step forward” on the labour market research portfolio, which he said used to be dominated by Ottawa, but has languished since being downloaded to the provinces and territories.

He said that, while there have been some improvements, most of the recommendations made by his 2009 advisory panel on labour market information have yet to be implemented. The need is “even more acute” now, Drummond added.

“Certainly in 2009, we did not have a labour shortage, we were going in to a very deep recession.”

He suggested that the federal government, in coordination with Statistics Canada and the provinces, “be more proactive” when it comes to a job vacancy survey.

“We need a very comprehensive number, and we need it to be granular,” Drummond said. “Even in engineering, there are seven different types of engineering.”

Drummond said more information is also needed about what happens to graduates from colleges and universities.

“If I’m in Grade 10, I should know what’s going to happen to me on the basis of a record, if I take education, if I take (information and communication technology), or if I take sociology,” Drummond said. “You have some information from 2005 at the moment. The labour markets don’t stay steady for nine years, that’s not very useful.”