Sir, I can go first.
Thank you very much for your question, Mr. Daniel
Certainly I think the solution lies in a lot of partners working together. From a federal perspective, we want to think about Canada as a whole in terms of having a competitive economy. When we're thinking about competition with China or India or Argentina, it's Canada as a whole, as a workforce, as an economy, that we look at in terms of competing.
The other aspect for the federal government to be interested in is the issue of mobility. Canadians want to be able to move from province to province, and employers want to be able to employ people from wherever they're coming from. Even though the federal government doesn't have a direct role, as you point out, in education and training, it certainly can have a convening role, and to some extent it has played that role.
Many provinces are very much interested in a national approach that would have the federal government at the table. Indeed the current minister of HRDC was at the meeting of the Forum of Labour Market Ministers for the first time a couple of years ago. That's a forum that had fallen away, to an extent. I'm glad to say that all the ministers, federal and provincial, see it as a really important forum for working together.
In terms of working with industry, Ms. Popovic mentioned the report by the Chamber of Commence. I think a number of the business organizations have become very concerned about and interested in the issue of skills shortages, especially in the past year or two, more than ever before.
Of course the sector councils, which I'm part of, bring together industry members with educators and government to work on these solutions. We don't deal with advocacy and we don't deal with advice that much; we deal with developing solutions, developing workplace learning, developing standards, and developing labour market information that is useful to employers.