When we look at the labour market, we see an interesting dynamic. We have businesses that say they're not really willing to invest in the current market, and about half of them are saying they're not willing to invest because demand is weak. You can certainly understand that from a micro level. If you're an individual company, you don't have orders coming in, you're not going to invest in a lot of additional capacity, you're not going to expand your labour force.
The lack of demand is a functional challenge. It's very difficult to deal with because, as I tried to emphasize, a lot of the weakness that we have in Canada is actually because we're a small, open economy and the world economy is having a difficult time. However, you then get some interesting observations about some of the things that are taking place. For example, we are seeing more industries that are actually bumping up into capacity constraints. Surely businesses that are running into capacity constraints should be investing more in capital, and also hiring more workers to expand their business, but they're not doing it.
Last week, we had a speech from Bank of Canada Governor Poloz, who emphasized that maybe businesses need to lower the rate of return that they expect on investment in a low-rate environment. I think there's an element of truth to that. However, we shouldn't put the onus just on businesses because there are barriers to investment and growth.
One of the examples that I tried to highlight was the fact that we have about a quarter of employers that are actually saying they can't find the skilled workers they need. There are two ways of addressing that. In the short run, you can bring in foreign talent in order to fill those roles to allow the growth. At the end of the day, though, what you really want from a long-term perspective is you want the education system and the skills system to actually create workers with the skills that the businesses need. I think the productivity story is all connected to this because your economy is not going to be productive if businesses aren't investing, and your economy is not going to be productive if businesses can't find the workers with the skills they need.