It is, absolutely. I just want to say very quickly that when we were in Halifax as a committee—I think the chair referred to it as friendly fire—we received the testimony of senior policy analysts with the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, and the comment, which I will quote, was: “It's true”—referring to what's called the negative employment or skills shortage in Alberta—“that in Alberta there's a lot of negative unemployment..... Recently, I was looking over Statistics Canada numbers, and surprisingly, Alberta has the lowest participation of women in the workforce.... Quebec has the highest.... The reason is very easy”—and she said she rechecked those numbers, because she couldn't believe it—“the day care system.”
I quote again:
There are factors in the market that work differently than just a job offer. The day care system in Quebec...encourages women to go back to work much sooner after they have children. Alberta doesn't have that.