I think what's changed since the last time the committee examined this—and I'm assuming our colleagues in the labour sector would probably agree—is that we've seen a seismic shift in the way labour markets operate, not just in Canada but globally. You can look at the U.S. and other places. Employers find themselves short of labourers in a lot of places.
The other thing we're also seeing is that in our industry, people work at plants. They can't work from home, for the most part. Many of them have exited our industry. We're having trouble attracting people to our industry, because jobs where you can work from home are at a premium. Some people are making life decisions. We're probably going to see less participation in the labour market than we did before because of the COVID situation and life decisions people are making.
That's why we as an industry realize that we need to do a strategic plan for our own industry when it comes to labour, to look at medium- to long-term solutions. We know that temporary foreign workers can be a stopgap solution immediately, but we know we need to look at other solutions.
The program you're referring to, I think, is the sector councils. We used to have sector councils for pretty much every sector of the Canadian economy. Maybe that's something we need to look at. I know they were disbanded about 10 years ago, but that might be the type of approach we need to bring labour unions and employers together. We're all in this together. We need to come up with innovative solutions.
We're dealing with a pretty unique problem. We know we're not the only ones; every sector of the economy is facing it. Employers in your ridings are probably telling you that everybody's short of labour. Some of the elements about our own situation are somewhat unique, for the reasons I outlined earlier.