Thank you.
We have a set of forecasts that we do every year. They're available on the department's Internet site for people who need to learn more about where areas of shortages and areas of potential surpluses are in Canadian labour markets. It comes in this form here, and it's done through a forecasting exercise that this department has been doing for over a quarter of a century.
We are working on the current forecast for 2006, but I have preliminary results and they give an indication of the number of different areas in which you find occupational pressures. You might be interested or amused that on the top of my list are legislators and senior management as areas of shortage. I suspect it's more in the category of senior management that there are shortages.
But there is a whole range of occupations now--human resources managers, human resources and business service professionals, geologists, geochemists, geophysicists, civil engineers. It is a very long list that goes through the full list of health occupations, lawyers, Quebec notaries, university professors, psychologists, professional occupations in public relations and communications. There are quite a number in the trades--residential home builders and renovators, facility operation and maintenance managers. I could go on.
Clearly one of the reasons there is such a spectrum of occupations in which there are pressure points now is that these pressures are not just coming from strong growth in the economy in some areas. In fact, by our forecast, two out of three of the job openings that will take place in the next 10 years will arise not because a new job was created but because somebody retired from an existing job. That means that because of population aging, you start to see the pressures across a wider spectrum of the occupations that people do than you would if you just thought of oil and gas as being a hot sector or of health as being a hot sector.
As to the implications of these pressures, clearly one of the implications is going to be upward pressure on earnings to encourage people to stay in the workforce, to entice people to move into the areas where the demand is the greatest. If you're a worker, I don't think you would think this is a terrible problem. You would probably think it is a good problem. I think clearly firms are going to have to learn to adapt to these pressures. They are going to have to start to invest in new technology, start to invest in new efficiencies to make more effective use of Canadian workers. That might be an important contributing factor in reducing the difference between Canadian and U.S. levels of productivity or output per worker.