The answer to that question, Pat, is absolutely yes.
It wasn't that long ago that we were concerned about getting enough qualified tradespeople to build up the infrastructure in the oil sands and the petroleum industry. Now it's not just about building up those projects; it's about maintaining those projects. It was only a couple of years ago that the workforce needed to maintain those projects overstepped the building of those projects. That's not going away anytime soon.
One of the challenges we have in the apprenticeship community or in the trades community is that, when the economy takes a dip like that, people leave. It's always hard to backfill that once the economy picks up again. We also have an aging workforce. That's always eating at us. It's not just in our sector, but in all sorts of sectors. We heard from the trucking sector, for instance, that they're facing the same issues.
What we talked about in our brief was really trying to develop programs, the parity of esteem, and trying to make programs more accessible, because apprenticeship for a lot of people is one of the country's best-kept secrets. They don't truly know what's involved in it. Part of our brief speaks to the need for us to get out there and communicate that value-added proposition to Canadians.