Thank you very much.
Indeed, it's an interesting challenge we have in front of us. We've traditionally been out there trying to create more work and help more people in the workforce, and now we have an economy that seems to be coming at us, that is going to demand more employment, and we're not ready for it, obviously.
We have pools of people we could tap into. We talked about this yesterday in Calgary. A lot of people are eyeing the older generation, and the older generation is saying, “Hang on here, we may not necessarily want to work past 60 or 65. We've done our bit, and we should have good pensions and be able to live in dignity and have a quality of life that doesn't demand that we go back to work. If we want to, so be it, but it should be a top-up.”
We have our aboriginal people, the fastest growing sector of our population, but we haven't been able to find a way to make it easy for them. We find that they're overrepresented in the category that we refer to as poor in our country.
We have disabled people, immigrants, and women.
It seems to me that we need to be working together, and the government has a major role, a lead role, to play in this.
My first question is for the Federation of Labour. It seems to me that the kinds of things you've been doing with the Canadian Labour and Business Centre are exactly tailor-made for this--having labour sit down with business to figure out a way to move forward that will see everybody's needs being met, allow the economy to go as it has the potential, but make sure that all the boats rise so that we don't end up, as is actually happening in some parts of Alberta and Calgary, creating more poor than we're helping.
I know the funding for the Canadian Labour and Business Centre was cut in the last month and that agency is now shut down. Talk to me a bit about the impact of that and why it is that actually we should be doing more of that type of thing.