Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for coming today.
I want to congratulate Acadia University for its involvement in your program, particularly in view of the fact that my daughter is there in first year at your institution. I must tell you, having said that, that I gained a whole new respect for Mr. Kymlicka when I spotted his X-ring, which shows that he's a graduate from the number one undergraduate university in the country, which my daughter didn't choose, for some reason. That's her choice. They're both great universities, as they all are in Nova Scotia, of course.
I have lots of questions. I will start with Mr. Kymlicka, if I may.
I agree with your focus on immigrants and their importance for our region, without question. In fact, I appreciated the paper by Brian Crowley a couple of years ago when he talked about the fact that we have to be a welcoming society. It isn't enough to be tolerant of immigrants; we have to make them feel welcome. It's a matter of the heart when you move somewhere new, and we have to understand that and make sure that people feel welcome in all our communities. That's one of our challenges.
You focused on immigrants and how we need to bring more of them into our region to solve or to deal with our shortage of workers and skilled workers. What I didn't hear about were people who are kind of on the margins and have been left behind, such as adults, for instance, who need literacy training or skills upgrading and so on to be more a part of our workforce. It seems to me that there is a role for government in terms of those kinds of programs, and I'd like your thoughts on that.
Second, you talk about it not making sense to pay people to stay home and so forth. Let me just ask you about older workers. We heard Monday in St. John's from the FFAWU, of course, defending fishermen and people working in the fishing industry. They spoke of women who are 58 and 60 years old who worked their whole lives on concrete floors with their hands in cold water cutting fish, and who now have arthritis and bad backs. They're not really in a position to learn to be rocket scientists or software engineers and so on.
What would you propose we do with people like that? What kind of support programs...? Do we put income support programs in place? Would you really argue that they have to move from where they are and find new employment and new skills?