Right: good question. Let me unpack it in a couple of different ways.
The first issue is that we just don't have a grip as a country, or even in any province, on what are the different barriers being faced by apprentices. To answer the bigger question that I think all of you should ask yourselves, why don't we have more tradespeople certifying? The nature of that training, the nature of that kind of acquisition of skills, is that you must learn from a master craftsperson. If we don't have master craftspersons, journeypersons, then we will not be able to train the next generation. So completion is the problem.
I also believe we need to recognize that the federal government has year after year tried to attack the problem by giving more incentives to individual apprentices. The time has come now to get a grip on the data. That's what this is. This would be a voluntary number assigned, like a SIN, a social insurance number, to those applying for federal supports so that over time you would be able to track them.
We actually spend $7 million on a national apprenticeship survey once every decade. Going back to the earlier question that Mr. Rankin asked me, on the speed at which Statistics Canada crunches the data, the last time we surveyed the apprentice population in this country was 2002. We didn't get the data until 2009. Now we're in 2014, on the other side of the recession.
That's why I think we need a real-time data set on apprentices. You would find willing apprentices giving their number.