We are looking at that. We believe there is no role for government; it needs to be industry-driven. Industry itself has to look at ways to better integrate. So we have worked with immigration settlement agencies in various provinces across the country, we have worked with organizations that work with people with disabilities, and we try to work with them to find ways to match some of our members with the people they're bringing in through those systems.
At the national level it's more difficult for us to do, so we do a lot of that work more regionally. For example, prior to my role here in Ottawa, I was in Alberta for five and a half years as the provincial director for CFIB and I did lots of work with some of the groups like EmployAbilities out of Edmonton. I would work with them and talk with them, and we would try to find ways to get more information to employers to help them understand what they need to do to integrate people into their workplace.
What we really try to push--and when we look at these groups, many of them are doing great work helping aboriginals, for example, and people with handicaps and new immigrants get the skills they need to get the job. But what happens too often is that these people now have the skills, but when they move into a workplace, sometimes that workplace doesn't know how to integrate that person very well and we lose out helping that business understand what it needs to do to help make that person feel welcome.
So a lot of the work we do is to try to find ways to broaden these programs to also help employers understand how to educate other employees as well as themselves to better integrate that person into that particular workplace. Some of the work I did in Alberta was also with aboriginal groups in trying to look at the ways they could extend their programs to at least provide information to employers as to what they may need to understand to be more culturally sensitive to that particular employee and make sure they stay there for more than three months. Too often people feel alienated when they come into a company because they may feel different, and they end up leaving after three to six months. Having that support network with employers for at least a few months, I think, goes a long way in helping that person eventually integrate into a workforce.