Our industry has been in transition for many years. Advances in farming practices, reduction of farmers, and the advent of new technologies have had a great impact on our business. There is continuing consolidation within the dealer networks, and dealerships have had no choice but to merge with neighbouring locations to reduce costs and improve efficiencies.
Additionally, manufacturers have reinforced their desire to consolidate the dealer network and are encouraging the issue in the marketplace. Many of our members see this as an opportunity to grow their businesses. This is a significant issue within our membership, and all of our associations are providing assistance to dealers in some respect to help them through this transition, but we would like to advise the committee that this is a trend that we don't see changing over the foreseeable future, nor one that we wish to intervene in.
The 2007 forecast also addressed issues that are of the greatest importance. The greatest industry challenge and concern of the Canadian equipment dealer is people. We are in a constant battle to recruit and retain employees, and the biggest challenge is within our technicians. In our 2007 forecast, almost 72% of Canadian dealers view technician availability as their number one concern.
For the most part, our dealer members are located in rural areas, and in a lot of cases, our members are the largest employers in the community. Nevertheless, we are finding it increasingly difficult to fill the many openings that we have, and our current estimate is that there are over 1,000 career openings for technicians across Canada with no immediate solution on the horizon.
All three of our Canadian associations have undertaken creative approaches to address this need. These approaches have included foreign recruitment, creation of scholarships, direct sponsorship of students, career videos, cost sharing of textbooks, marketing campaigns, and creating partnerships with regional colleges, to name just a few.
We have been actively involved with the recruitment of people from our industry to work for our industry for the past ten years and have collectively allocated over $500,000 on this effort so far. We look to the committee to support job creation and retention efforts in rural-based agricultural businesses.
We would also like to point out one final, notable item from the 2007 outlook. Only 14% of our dealer members across Canada view the Canadian agricultural income subsidization program as the issue that they are most concerned about, and an overwhelming 57% are not concerned about the CAIS program at all.
Although our industry is appreciative of any federal farm support provided to our customers, our survey tells us that the levels of farm support are less of an issue today than they were in the past. We recognize, however, that this opinion can change from year to year.