Thank you so much. My message will be brief and succinct.
We have a crisis in Canada in terms of skills shortage. As you start looking at the sectors, there is no sector untouched by the skills shortage. In oil and gas, certainly in my home province of Alberta, it is severe, but so is it in the manufacturing sector, the forestry sector, and so forth. In fact, as concerns one of the papers that I write for, they can't deliver the paper because we also have an unskilled labour shortage in this country that is affecting the quality of life.
As you start looking at some of the data presented in our brief, you will see sector after sector reporting significant skills shortages. What we would ask the government to do in the upcoming budget is not to blink; stay the course. In the last budget in May 2006, there were some good measures, tools, if you will, in terms of supporting apprenticeship. Certainly on the employers' side there were some incentives, and for the apprentices there were some incentives. You had also indicated a billion-dollar fund, if a surplus was there, for infrastructure. I'm telling you, the infrastructure is crumbling across Canada.
You may say, well, you're from Alberta and you can afford it. I would say to you that in fact in Alberta we paid the cost in terms of the 21% cut in our budgets, and if you look at just the post-secondary side, there is a $1.5 billion to $2 billion deficit on infrastructure. So infrastructure is very important. As the government has created the demand, we have the challenge now of meeting that demand, for looking at the skilled labour shortage. How do we do that? We need the kind of infrastructure that will support that kind of training. It is not done simply over the Internet. You need the hands-on equipment and facilities to look at apprenticeship.
In terms of apprenticeship, the statistics are there to show you that, for Canada to be competitive, we must have a strong apprenticeship system, and I would say to you that you need to invest in the infrastructure program so that in the post-secondary sector we can benefit from that to supply the kind of skilled labour needed in this country.
Just to give you a couple of statistics, which I'm sure you have, 16% of the employment in Ontario is directly related to the oil and gas sector. Even at $60 a barrel, we have a skills shortage. We need to invest in turning out more. At NAIT, we will do 15,000 apprentices this year alone. There will be 65,000 apprentices registered in Alberta, and that message is translated in other provinces in terms of the need for trades, and so forth.
So I would humbly ask you to stay the course, invest in the infrastructure, a billion-dollar-plus program for infrastructure in post-secondary, and I will leave you this thought: NAIT was created in 1960 with the Technical and Vocational Training Assistance Act, which invested federal dollars into the bricks and mortar to make apprenticeship happen in this country.
Thank you so much.