Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Gentlemen, thanks for being here today.
I have three sons between 19 and 24 years of age, and so it may look a little self-serving—me wanting to get them off my payroll and onto somebody else's—but I'll ask these questions on behalf of the almost 15% of young Canadians who find themselves unemployed. There's an even more alarming stat, which is those who are disengaging completely from the workforce. I think everybody around this table knows it's in everybody's best interests to do what we can, and make the suggestions we can, to close that gap.
That being said, as Jean said in her comments and Mr. Daniel mentioned in his, mentorship and work experience are key components of this, and I think the federal government has a role to play in mentoring. I know that one of the great opportunities is through summer work experience, through the federal branch, but we see that through Industry Canada's summer work experience program, between the years of 2006 and 2011, the department did not spend over 25% of its annual budget allotted for summer workers.
Could you explain to us how that might have happened?