There is a need for skilled trades workers. And there is a need for supporting apprenticeships in different ways--and you will see that in our submission--to allow workers to acquire the trade skills needed to work in the workplace.
On the other side, a skills shortage is an educational matter. Canada is number one in the world in educational attainment. Most workers, because of the general knowledge they have, are working in underemployment conditions. We don't understand why employers are not taking better advantage of the knowledge people really have and that they carry into the workplace.
I want to distinguish between those. What we say is that in terms of a skills shortage in educational attainment, we are not in a crisis situation; for skilled trades, we are in a situation in which more and more people are retiring, and new people are not being hired.
I want to quickly attach this to the issue of foreign credentials, because first, many of those trades do not have the same mechanism for recognition that the dentistry college has. Plus, it's not only foreign credentials that they need to recognize; it's also the experience acquired in other countries. Many countries, especially in Latin America, which I'm very familiar with, do not have apprenticeship systems that are regulated like they are here. People learn through other means and get recognized in their jobs by other means. We should have some mechanism by which we look at the experience people have when they come here, and not only at their credentials, the formal credentials, they acquire in their own countries.