Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to be splitting my time with Mr. Baker since we might only have one round.
I want to thank all of the witnesses for their excellent presentations.
I only have time to ask questions of maybe one, and they will be directed to you, Mr. Strickland.
In my riding of Davenport, I have a lot of members of unions, particularly construction unions. Ever since I was elected just over eight years ago, I've been very focused on them, very focused on their issues.
I will say to you that I'm very proud of our government. Over the last eight years, we've made huge improvements in worker rights and in more supports for unions. We very much started out with actually repealing two pieces of what I would consider very anti-union, anti-worker legislation when we first came in: Bill C-525 and Bill C-377.
I want to thank you for your leadership, Mr. Strickland. You have really pushed us to do quite a few things. I want to thank you also.... You were very laudatory today about the labour requirements around ITCs, as well as the funding that we have and the importance that we have in the fall economic statement around apprenticeships. Both are game-changers.
What I want to talk to you about is this: There are also measures in here around breaking down barriers to the internal labour mobility in our country and also around prioritizing construction workers for permanent residency. I would love it if you could comment on both of those. We have already introduced a new labour mobility tax deduction. Again, it's something that you very much championed, but now we're moving to the next phase to remove more barriers to internal labour mobility.
The second part is that we are actually, in our express entry immigration system, prioritizing construction workers. Can you talk about how important both of these elements are to our moving forward on the construction that we need, particularly in housing, across this country?