Yes, you are right. In the study we did, there were 11,500 vacant jobs in New Brunswick, 12,000 in Nova Scotia and 2,500 in Prince Edward Island. The question is really very simple. Your analyst can access all our figures; they are in the presentation I provided.
We asked employers how many employees they currently had and how many jobs had been vacant for four months or more. We didn’t want to know the ones that had been vacant for two or three weeks. We cleaned up the data for the calculations. For example, if an employer answered 50 when he employed 80 people, it was much too high. We really cleaned up as much as we could. Yes, our figures may include part-time and seasonal employees. Therefore the number may be lower.
At the Moncton office, where I often answer the telephone, I received a call from an employer who has a fish processing business in Shédiac. He asked me very honestly how he could help his employees obtain employment insurance benefits. I thought I had misunderstood; he repeated his question. He told me he worked from May to October and did not want to lose his qualified employees. He told me they were the best and if they went elsewhere to find a full-time job, he would really be in trouble. He had no one to replace them. He asked me what he should do so his employees qualify for employment insurance. I gave him the information he asked me for and that was it. That happens often.
It’s true that people in major urban centres who have not lived in regions like mine, including me who had to learn all that, do not realize that employees who work in fish processing plants are highly valued and add great value to their company. That is their lifestyle. There are people who do something else during the season when there is no fishing and are able to maintain the skills they have learned; however, that does not apply to everyone.