Thank you very much for the question.
You're absolutely right. There's no question. Retention rates of 93% are pretty high, and it's non-wage-subsidized real work, real-pay jobs. What we've been able to demonstrate through this project is that the individuals who are trying to get into the labour market make excellent employees. In the information packages we've passed out, we've shown a number of businesses that have hired over and over again through RWA, not just one time. They've hired more and more employees through Ready, Willing and Able because those employees have proven to be excellent employees, and also to increase the employer's competitive advantage because of the fact that turnover and retraining costs a lot of money. These things cost money to the system.
The other thing about this is the 20% employment rate. You're not going to change it in three years. It's going to take investment over a sustained period of time to be able to really change the game on that. We've just really begun and had excellent, excellent success.
Going back to your retention rate, the external evaluation we had for this program stated that, by far and away, this was the most successful one they had ever evaluated, and the evaluators had evaluated a number of federal employment initiatives over the years