Yes, it is a conundrum. There's no question about that. As an economic development agency, as I previously indicated, we're meeting with companies on a regular basis. Of course, Don's group are members of the most senior companies that are part of the Manitoba business council.
What we hear is that everything revolves around talent. Everything revolves around skill. The issue is that when you start to reach a saturation point with respect to where the available skilled labour lies, companies look critically at what their future investments will be in the market. When that happens, they start to look at other operations that they have in the United States or other countries.
What we're trying to do as an organization is understand where the gaps exist. I'll identify one particular industry sector, and that's the ICT sector. It is across the nation. It is a massive challenge. How does the temporary foreign worker program potentially act as a bridge in order to be able to provide some of the skill sets that are required for that particular industry sector? Our job is to aggregate the expertise with post-secondaries, with industry, and with research institutes to try and figure out how you establish an appropriate pipeline, so that when we are working with existing companies there's a recognition that there's a pipeline of skills that can come through the system. The challenge is that the volume of labour that's in the marketplace does not necessarily match what's required by the companies in the market.
I'll go back to the information piece. What's critical is to really understand where those gaps exist. You can have anecdotal information, and you can have evidence-based information.