Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) Minister Diane Finley has signed three new agreements with her counterparts in the European Union to improve labour mobility between Canada and the EU.

The goals of these agreements are to improve foreign credential recognition, facilitate international labour mobility, andstrengthen the Canada-EU partnership.

Two of today's announced agreements focus on engineers and environmental professionals, seeking to practices in the engineering field and to developmutual certification frameworks for environmental workers in Canada and the EU. The third will help organize two roundtable discussions on foreigncredential recognition and labour mobility, one in Europe this year and the other in Canada in 2010.

"The Government of Canada, through ESDC, is again demonstrating leadership by investigating mechanisms to allow the Canadian environment sector to reachits full economic and employment potential in the global economy by funding a scoping project to document reciprocal mobility of competent workers betweenCanada and the European Union," said Grant Trump, of the Environmental Career Organization of Canada.