Am I a bit frustrated with this? The short answer is yes. If you look at it, you'll see that there is enough work in the future for the next 10 years in Canada for the workforce we have, plus the workforce we're going to need to attract to keep the numbers up to a critical mass. The only issue is that people have to move from place to place. In some cases, when you're travelling on your own nickel or your employer is giving you $65 a day to live, you're subsidizing that employer.
In some cases, you may live in the camp and it's all found, but the guy who drives from Corner Brook to St. John's to get the flight spends a lot of money. A lot of people look at it and say, “Gee, if I'm living in Alberta and it's costing me $185 a night for a hotel room and I have to buy my meals, what's the point?”
The long and the short of this one is that by coming up with some way to assist people in moving across this country, we actually benefit the country. One of the most important drivers when people look at investing $6 billion to build the Vale Inco smelter, investing $12 billion to do Muskrat Falls, or putting down $10 billion to build an upgrader in Fort McMurray is, will we get enough people with the right skills at the right time? If they can't be assured of that, they don't invest.
So as an economic driver, making sure that we have a workforce that's mobile.... I wouldn't call us seasonal. I don't think we're seasonal anymore; we are transitory from job to job, because no job lasts forever. But until and unless there is some way of ensuring ready access to the pool of people who are unemployed in another part of this country, and to creating a truly mobile construction maintenance workforce, it's a disincentive for people who are going to spend their money.