Mr. Lavoie, I agree with you about double billing, both federal and provincial. This is why the sovereignist movement arose en 1970. This is really a dual administration and dual payment. I agree with you, because this is so in many cases.
I was a bit shocked to hear you say just now that SMEs are not at all favourable to parental leave. The business world is complaining about the low birth rate. The way to increase the birth rate would be to offer parental leave and one-year maternity leave, so that the young generation can return to family values. We also need child care centres, because I think that young parents are not ready to leave their baby with a grandmother or an aunt or with anyone they can find out there.
Mr. Argento, I was also rather shocked to hear what you had to say about the mobility of construction workers. If you take someone with a seasonal job on a farm where potatoes or some other crop is being grown and you make a construction worker out of that person, what will happen to the farmer who was employing him? His company might well be an SME. How will he cope with losing his manpower? You are just taking from Peter and giving to Paul.
I think that with the current scarcity of manpower and the large number of school dropouts, we should perhaps incite schools, chambers of commerce and companies to seek out the 15 and 16 year-olds to show them the real meaning of work and education. There is a great potential for recruiting manpower among young people who dropped off school because they do not know what they want and because they have no guidance. With a bit of patience, you could explain to the older workers who are afraid of losing their jobs that they could train the new generation, in this way we could probably solve the problem of school dropouts and scarcity of manpower. But we must not tell them that they have to hand their jobs over; we should rather tell them that they have experience to transmit. In this way, we would avoid emptying the country side and creating urban congestion. Actually, people are leaving the rural regions. The general store is emptying its shelves, Rona is closing down and then the younger generation leaves and we wonder why schools are being closed and the young are not returning to the region.
I would like to hear what you have to say about all this, because I feel very strongly about this issue.