I see that it's opening up now. You can have a good view of the harbour and the city. There may even be some sunshine later on today. Who knows?
Thanks to all of you for your presentations. I'm sorry that I had to step out for a moment to do an interview.
Let me ask you this first, Bob Blakely. As someone who travels back and forth to Ottawa regularly, I know that there are always a lot of Newfoundlanders heading to work, many to Alberta, because the flight from here goes from St. John's to Ottawa to Edmonton and then up to see Brian Jean in his riding.
I have a lot of respect for all of those people who travel back and forth. They live in their communities in Newfoundland and many of them drive a few hours to get to St. John's before they even go out there. They're working in Alberta or elsewhere, keeping their community going here in Newfoundland and Labrador with their income, with their families here.
We do have a crisis, obviously, in workers--we hear it all the time--especially in construction. But the two things about construction are: one, the requirement for people to move to get to work is significant; and two, in many cases, the seasonality of construction projects makes this type of work less attractive. People like to have year-round employment. They like to have steady work and they like to have a steady income.
I get a sense of frustration from you. You keep proposing ways of making life easier for workers and of making those jobs more attractive, but are you getting any response at all from the government in terms of proposals to make these jobs more attractive? How else are we going to achieve the resolution to the worker shortage and skills shortage if we don't do things like that?