Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And thank you very much to each of you for appearing before us today.
Mr. Smillie, recently I was at a conference of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and there was a session on education and training. One of the Calgary-based oil executives or CEOs said he had just as much interest in the quality of trades training in Nova Scotia or Newfoundland as he did in Alberta, because of the mobility of the workforce in Canada.
Over the weekend I was in Mr. Jean's riding of Fort McMurray, where a lot of Atlantic Canadians are living and working. One of the things I saw in that riding...when you talk to people, you learn that some of the training programs enable people after grade 10 to go to a summer job, to do some form of apprenticeship after grade 11, and then in grade 12 they graduate from high school with a skilled trade.
Given the diversity of practices around trades within Canadian provinces, do we really need a robust national trades and learning strategy in Canada—working with the provinces?