That's a great question. The most important thing is having some clarity about which direction we're headed in.
We saw that with the coal transition. We gave a deadline. We said, “We aren't going to be burning coal by x year.” That allows workers, the corporations that are affected and the communities that are host to the coal industry to plan for that transition. They have a runway.
Right now we don't have that in oil and gas. If you're a high school kid in Calgary right now, what is your economic future? You have people in one ear telling you that your best bet is oil and gas. People in the other ear are telling you that you need to be looking at different kinds of careers.
There's no clarity, and that means those communities and those industries can't plan for the future. We need greater clarity about our economic direction first. That basically underpins all of our workforce development.
Then we also need to be proactive. This is certainly the case in a lot of the building trades, where not only do we have skill shortages now, but we can see enormous skill shortages in 10 years. That's about as long as it takes to train someone up from start to finish for a lot of skilled trades.
That's why government in particular needs to be leading on that. We need to train these workers so that we have them when we need them. We can't wait until we have shortages and then hope we can retroactively train workers quickly to meet those needs.