Thank you for the question.
Certainly, it's our hope that, with the combination of the work that provinces and territories are doing, these additional measures could speed up the completion by up to 50%.
Ultimately, what we're trying to do.... By the way, this is not cutting corners on training. It's not reducing training or ratios or anything like that. There has been some concern expressed about that. This is not at all going to interfere with the jurisdiction of provinces and territories on training hours or ratios.
We think we can support the modernization of the Red Seal process. In Ontario, for example, in my son's trade, it's hard to believe, but people still carry a paper logbook to account for the hours they're accumulating toward their Red Seal certification. Sometimes those logbooks get damaged or lost and, believe it or not, people have to start over in accumulating those hours. That's a huge blow to somebody's journey. In fact, it really can set people back years in some cases if that unfortunate occurrence happens.
There are other things, though. People talk about how challenging it is to do the testing. If you're not in a major centre and you're not near a test centre, you may have to drive for hours. You may have to stay overnight, in fact, to go to a testing centre in northern Ontario. You may have to go to Thunder Bay or perhaps one of the other larger small towns to do your testing.
We're proposing to examine, with provinces and territories, things like some online learning and some online testing and ways in which we can streamline getting a national apprenticeship number, so that if people are studying in Alberta, they don't need a new apprenticeship number in Ontario. They can carry on their apprenticeship training in the province they're moving to.
There are a number of different ways that we can do this, but it all requires good collaboration with provinces and territories.