There are so many answers to this question, but from my perspective it is about skills and competencies. We could go right back to our literacy levels, which are in decline in this country. The federal government does have a role to play in supporting the development of literacy skills. I know that everybody thinks that's education, but when it comes to workplace training, we have aboriginal people, immigrants, and people with disabilities. Especially for people with disabilities, we don't think about that, but it's harder for them if they've had this disability from birth, and it's harder for them to gain those cognitive skills that they need in the first place. We could be supporting their training in adulthood a bit longer.
For the cognitive skills that are needed, we are in decline and we need more of them. We have no level one jobs left on a five-point scale for literacy and cognitive skills in this country, but we still have 40% of our workforce at levels one and two. We could increase our productivity by increasing the cognitive, literacy, and math skills of our workforce, and then demanding that we use them. If we want to be more productive in this country, we're going to have to raise the level of demand for skills, as well as our level of supply.
For some of the jobs, and for want of a better word, we've dumbed down those jobs over the last little while. We need people to be using all the skills they have, and I think that the federal government has a role to play in increasing the demand for literacy skills for our employers to help them add more value. Let's take McDonald's. Everybody thinks McDonald's is a low-skilled workforce, but it's getting to be a higher-skilled workforce. When they put in those new machines, they had to increase the number of people to make the hamburgers because a customized hamburger is more difficult to make, and it takes more cognitive skill than what you did with a Big Mac. Even McDonald's has increased the demand for cognitive skills in their employees, and their sales are going up and their profits are going up because of it. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.