I wear another hat some of the time. I'm involved with George Brown College, so I work very closely with their technologies area, which of course deals with our residential skills to a great degree, although they offer some of the red seal trades in their program as well.
My belief is that without the national action plan, it's very difficult to fit all of the other pieces to a program. Once that is in place, then I think the capacity is there within the colleges—particularly the colleges—to carry forward with the training that's needed in our industry and probably for some of the people in the other areas too. There's a strong wish to train in those areas. It appears there's a wish for quite a few young people, but the pathway to get into the skills is very unclear.
We've always felt that we have to start working with young people at kind of junior high level, so in grades seven, eight, and nine, when they're starting to show which direction they wish to go with their education, not necessarily tied in completely. But because we lost shops and so on from our high schools, the kids just don't get a chance to touch, feel, and consider the kinds of education we're talking about. Perhaps we can influence that, so there's the opportunity to try.
There are a number of small programs in various parts of the country where our organization and our builders are working directly with schools or colleges on sort of pilot or demonstration programs, where young people are trying the trades. It needs to be expanded way beyond that, and I suspect this applies to other fields as well as ours.