It is a concern. One of the solutions has been to seek amalgamation with other people with deep pockets. The firms are doing extremely well, so the value of the shares, even of employee-owned firms, would be quite great, but there are very few people to sell them to.
You're quite right. A little bit of it is that we're asking some of the leaders in our industry to grow up a little faster and to step into those leadership roles.
Again, as another compliment to the education system, I find that some of the younger engineering graduates have tools that I could not have dreamt of when I went to university. I think they are probably better equipped to step into these roles than I was at a similar age. That's part of it, but it really still becomes a workload issue.
I have also observed that people are working harder and longer to make up the time to bring projects in on budget.
The automation and technology that are available to us to do projects faster are—I'm trying to find the right word—not giving us the leisure society people were promised when I was a kid, but they're still allowing us to deliver the goods as we need to, so that's part of it as well.
Immigration is part of it. The challenge is to get the right people in terms of the discipline, the training, and the appropriate background, and also to get people to step into leadership roles in firms. Often when you're promoting from within, you're looking at people who have relationships with your key clients, people you have watched over many years demonstrating leadership skills. You're watching people who understand provincial codes, provincial laws, and things of that nature. It's a challenge. Frankly, I would suggest that we need to avoid a similar situation so that we don't end up in this position 20 years from now.
I'd like to put in a little plug for a long-term infrastructure investment program. That is critical for us to build our industry, because when you hire a new employee, whether they're 25 or 55, it's usually a year or two before they become productive. It's an investment to hire someone. You take them on; you have contractual obligations if they don't work out, so you have to factor those in, but you have to train them. You have to bring them on board. You have to make that long-term investment in them. It's very difficult to do when you're funding comes from infrastructure programs that run for a couple of years and stop for a couple of years. Building Canada was quite refreshing because it lasted about seven years—not long enough, in my opinion, but that's centuries long in governmentspeak. That would certainly help us build capacity in the industry.