That's a very good point. The group that has been impacted the most within the decline of manufacturing is younger workers. They're the last to get in the door and they're typically the first to get laid off when things go south.
Again, anecdotally, we can look at some of the highest youth unemployment communities in Canada. A lot of them are in Ontario. In places like London and places like Windsor, there's been a mass exodus of these manufacturing jobs, as is clear. We know this. That's forcing some young people to make some important decisions on where they go and also on where they raise their families. Sometimes they have families. How do they disrupt that family life to go elsewhere?
These are problems, but at the same time, in understanding the challenges of labour market mobility in this case, it's important that we look at this really critically, knowing that there's another side to it that we can't just dismiss. I think that's critical.
I have just one more point on that. One of the things we've seen in Ontario, and it ties into one of the recommendations, is some directed investment on infrastructure projects, such as what happened when Toronto purchased new subway cars. There was a provision that said the cars had to be built in Canada.
Because of that provision, those cars were manufactured in a plant in Thunder Bay. It saved that plant. It was a Bombardier plant in Thunder Bay, a very old plant. Because of that provision, it actually brought in 500 new young workers, who now earn $30-plus an hour, a lot of them in skilled trades. It was all a product of good policy that directed public spending to save a plant and keep manufacturing jobs in a remote community.
To us, there's something in this that we should be exploring, not dismissing as protectionist and as old-school economic thinking. This could have tangible results. I think that's one answer, in some ways, to that question.