I actually recorded six questions there. I'll try to deal with them.
There is no question that our government values the contributions of older workers. As we go forward we recognize that within a decade, unless we find more workers, we're going to be even shorter of people than we are now. We will have a decline in our actual workforce unless we get immigrants in, unless we can take advantage of people who we already have. For example, with older workers, we need to keep them in the workforce and productive longer. We need to take advantage of the skills and talents of people with disability as well as those of aboriginals. Otherwise, we're not going to have enough people to fill the jobs in this country.
We believe that any program for older workers has to recognize that it's far better to keep people productively employed than to have them on income support programs exclusively. Whether that means retraining or some other kind of developmental program, that's what we want to explore. So far there have been over 150 different pilot projects across this country dealing with older workers. Nobody has come up with a magic solution yet. That's why I was so pleased when the Prime Minister announced that we will be conducting a feasibility study looking at the issue of older workers and how we can best help them and help keep them productive. That's good not only for the economy, but good for their self-esteem and their own well-being. We'll be going forward with that.
You referred to pilot project number six. That is the one about the five weeks extra for seasonal employees, what we call the seasonal gappers. I was very excited--and actually I was very disappointed at the same time--last week when I was unable to announce personally, but when my parliamentary secretary, who is with us today, was able to announce in the House that we will in fact be extending that program for another 18 months. This we believe will help seasonal workers in the areas of the pilot project. It will also give us a chance to collect another year's worth of data to analyze how effective the program is. We've made some tweaks to it to make it more efficient, more effective. We'll be able to assess the value that those provide. So we're looking forward to the results of that.