As for the automotive repair and service sector, those folks are everywhere, rural and urban. Everybody has a vehicle. They all need to be repaired at some point or another.
The New Brunswick community college in Bathurst is one of our accredited programs. They offer excellent automotive repair training and collision.
The challenge for our industry is to release people to go to training to upgrade their skills. If you're in a rural location, it's not just the cost of training. It's the downtime, the loss of productivity while that person or two people are away on training, if they have to go to Moncton or to Bathurst, for example. So what we came up with was our interactive distance learning, and that has worked very well.
The way it works is that a shop has a satellite dish and a television set in their lunch room or some common area in the shop, and we broadcast upgrade training--not apprenticeship training but upgrade training once they're in the workforce--so they can keep their skills updated.
That has worked very well, especially for rural communities, because it is such a challenge to keep their skills updated, and if they don't, their employability is greatly diminished, especially in our industry. So ways to bring training into the workplace are very key for our industries, and probably for others.
If you look at a corporation like Canadian Tire, they have stores everywhere across Canada and certainly need to attain training.
So there's interactive distance learning, distance training. We're now looking into e-learning, what the industry's capacity would be to receive training in that format.
Ensuring that people's skills are upgraded and keeping them employable is key, but they're certainly employable in these rural communities.