I can, actually. The last figures that I was intimately involved with were that the aerospace and defence sector in Nova Scotia employs about 6,500 people and it's worth $1.5 billion a year. I'm sure that will go up soon because IMP has just acquired Cascade Aerospace out west. That would be a bottom-line thing.
It's a big industry, it's an important industry, to this small province. I'm fairly confident in saying that there are a couple of concerns, however. One would be even maintaining that level. That goes back to the ability of the education system here to produce enough people to be able to work down the road at IMP Aerospace and in some of the other aerospace and defence industries around here.
As I mentioned, I was the chair of the HR partnership, a human resources partnership, working in partnership with the ADIANS and some of the educational institutions around here to try to hammer out what is the deficit going to be and why.
The “why” is that we have a lot of workers who are aging out. In the next five years many of them—somewhere about 50%—are expected to go. The education system here is not geared to produce the kids. You try to get in and talk to them and they'll close you off very quickly because every day the curriculum is planned all the way through.
We see, and it was certainly seen then, that if there is a relaxing of the rules and regulations that allow the IMPs of the world to bring in temporary or permanent foreign workers, then that's the only way they're going to get there from here.
There is a trickle down. They go to little paint shops, little machine shops, and places like that as well.