Yes, we did focus significantly in the paper on jobs and skills, and I note that next week the provincial ministers responsible for the Agreement on Internal Trade are meeting. This is something that should be a very important topic of discussion, because you have the mutual recognition issue in different provinces and then you also have the “scope of practice” issue. We put out a report on this, which says that in Ontario, if you're a massage therapist, you require a licence, and you don't in Alberta.
One thing we've seen in the North American context that has worked, although it's slow, is that the associations have gotten together. The architecture associations in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico worked. It took them seven years, but they ultimately got agreement of mutual recognition about what an architect is and how architects can be certified and can practise in the various countries. It doesn't deal with the admissibility issue, but if a Mexican architect were hired to work on a building in Winnipeg, they would simply have to get entry into Canada to do so, as anyone would when coming to work here. They wouldn't have the question of whether their credentials are recognized.
The only way really to get there is to do this painstaking process of trying to get the credential-granting organizations to talk to each other, to agree on a common nomenclature of what means what in the way those requirements are granted. In the internal trade context, I thought that one thing we could do, for example, might be to pick up on what we've done with tariff negotiations and take the Ellis chart, which lists all of the different credentials, and use it as a basis to say we're going to get to a common framework.
But there are many other things we can do. We talk about, for example, training. It's very hard to get people from companies that produce across North America to one location for training. Each individual has to apply. We've suggested that a company running a training course can say, “Here is the list of the 40 people who are coming to Mississauga to participate in this training course” and that CBSA be required to come back within five days and say yes or no. They may say, “These 38 are fine, but we need to look at these other two”, but at least you can have a batch application and a reasonable expectation about when you're going to receive information back.
What you've seen in many practical cases is that it takes much longer to get the visa to come into Canada to work at doing the training than it does to do the training. That doesn't make any sense, and people aren't out spending money at bars and restaurants and hotels and other facilities in Mississauga, so they tend to go to Las Vegas.