It is. The process we go through is that we have a statement of merit: merit must be met. Now, the issue is, what if everybody meets merit? Then who do you choose? I feel it's important to tell Canadians up front what their chances are of getting a job.
If you are looking.... This particular case was an AS-1. AS-1s are paid over $50,000 and they don't require post-secondary education. This is administrative support. We have no problem getting people to do this. I think it's fairer to say up front that we are trying to get visible minorities and aboriginal people.
They must meet that merit test. If I have a pool of people, why should I make people apply and then have them, at the end, not be chosen? Because we can go two ways. We can say you meet this merit test, and it's in two parts: what you must meet or what would be nice to have, what we'd like to have. So you can put “you must meet”, and it could be a member of the group, or you could put it in “nice to have”. If you put it in “nice to have”, you're going to have a whole bunch of people applying, and they're not going to get the job anyway because you'll go to the “nice to have”. So I think it's important that we tell people, all Canadians, up front.
Now, having said that, there are still a lot of jobs and a lot of hiring, but we get many more applications. We get hundreds and hundreds of applications for jobs.