I'm not surprised by the numbers you've got. We recently had access to a study from the Conference Board of Canada. Their approach into looking at temporary help agencies was to more or less celebrate it and suggest to their members that they've got opportunities here for bidding on contracts.
Nevertheless, their figure was $200 million a year in the national capital region alone. If you multiply that across the country, obviously it's considerably more.
What we hear from our members is that temporary help agency employment is being used for purposes well beyond the kind you were listing. It is being used essentially as a replacement for core work.
That leads into all the concerns we raised about developing a stable workforce, about the ability to attract the best candidates into long-term employment, about the concerns around knowledge transfer, because if somebody's going to come and do a task in a temporary help situation, the second they've got a chance for a longer-term contract somewhere else, they're going to move on to that. So it really does undermine some of the demographic transitional goals we think should be there.