On the skills side, there are some pages on that, and I won't bore you with them, but we tried to estimate for each job type what percentage of those jobs would be automated. Point number one is that no one is immune. I'm sure we won't have robots—and you can shut the computer off when I say this—as members of Parliament at any time, but I think all of us are going to have parts of our jobs automated, including mine. I think some people in my own firm have said they'd probably be better with a robot than me, but at least 30% of what I do now could be automated.
We went through the different job types, including transportation, manufacturing, construction, and finance. Everyone's going to have a chunk of their work automated. Everyone's job is going to change to some extent. The biggest concern we have is that people are going to have to start re-skilling at a more aggressive rate when they're older. It's going to be more difficult for people when they're 40 or 45 years old, because you can't leave your job to go to school. You have a mortgage, and you have kids, and so forth, so how are we going to put in a program that enables people to do part-time re-skilling as they go through it? How do we ensure that people know what it is that they're building skills for with a world that's changing?
Of the components we were talking about here, one is that all of us will have to have a mindset of re-skilling over time. We think being able to get information.... This was the future skills lab idea in the second wave of our recommendations to try to synthesize the future skills that will be needed in the economy. That doesn't really exist. We need to make sure that people can see that, and it's a combination of employers, SMEs, and others putting that in. We need to make sure that we have the educational institutions to be able to provide more flexible, part-time learning for people to go through.
We think it's a pretty broad shift. To us, it's like pension reform was at the turn of the last century. We need the equivalent of that. It's a very big issue, and we're worried that no country in the world is thinking about this as aggressively as we need to. I'm hoping that in Canada we can show the way on how to do this.