I just wanted to weigh in from the agriculture perspective on the skills gap. As I said in our presentation, we talked about new farmers and the need for more new farmers. Within the next 10 years, we can expect 70% of our current farmers to be retiring. That number is already significantly down from previous years. Less than 2% of Canada's overall population is currently actually farming. There are many more involved in the agriculture sector, both up and downstream. Within 10 years we can expect 70% of our current farmers to be retiring.
In a recent survey done by the National New Farmer Coalition last year, they found that about 70% of people looking to get into agriculture did not grow up on a farm. The ideas and the policy implications that are coming out of that traditional assumption that the farm gets passed on through the family, and the person taking it over has grown up with a lifetime worth of skills by the time they're 18, are no longer true, so we need new mechanisms to get young farmers access to farms. We need new mechanisms, experiential learning, and agriculture programs in universities. We need to tie all of those elements together, so even though we're talking about different sectors, the solutions are largely quite similar.
Interestingly, in New Brunswick, our provincial economic growth plan, just developed and launched last month, highly emphasized agriculture as an economic opportunity, since Canada as a whole—and New Brunswick, in particular, obviously for our provincial plan—has such a strategic asset with our agricultural lands that many other countries don't have. Bypassing this would be such a missed opportunity. We have the land and that's a resource we can't build, we can't create again, so how do we best take advantage of that?