That's very helpful, and I appreciate that.
The second premise, then, that I think your response leads us to, is this notion that immigration is a zero-sum equation. You set out in the consultation you had in the summer around the backlog and for us in the presentation a few weeks ago that this is really a matter of balancing streams of immigration as opposed to the issue of how much immigration we accept. Effectively, the limit on how many people we can let in is set.
Yet we know—and my colleague, Mr. Davies, touched on this earlier, I understand—there are labour shortages existing or certainly looming in this country. Between what the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association testified and what we heard from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and the building trades, they're talking about another 150,000, related only to their industries in one part of the country. That's 300,000 jobs identified as not being filled. I know there are a number of policy prescriptions that can deal with these sorts of things, but certainly immigration has to be one of them.
What struck me about the testimony we've heard is that what's missing here with respect to the economic stream is any kind of study that looks at the labour market and labour market plans going out over a significant time horizon, maybe five years, maybe ten years. In fact, some of our witnesses actually commented on the absence of such studies.
My question is, how do we do immigration policy without the benefit of labour market planning and labour market studies to identify shortages? How do we know that there's a limit to the economic stream that we can let into this country?