I want to mention two things, and it ties in with Mr. Lessard here.
We're seeing that the market is doing a much better job now. The Alberta employers are doing a much better job in accommodating workers from eastern Canada.
I spent nine years, through the late 1970s and early 1980s, back and forth to Fort McMurray. It's a place that I have a lot of time for and I still have a great number of friends there. There are a couple of different Fort McMurrays.
I have a brother who's working there now. The market is doing a tremendous job in accommodating skilled labour. They fly people out for three weeks and then they're home; it's a three-and-one rotation. They're out of the community. That money is coming back into our community, which is a positive thing. They're investing in their homes, they're buying new cars, they're buying their insurance, and their children still go to....
There's a social void, in that we don't have the coaches and they're not able to put the time in with the church group or be Boy Scout leaders, or whatever it might be. So it's different. But people in our community aren't foreign to that. We fished offshore draggers and we have many people who have military careers, but there still exists.... That's a great thing for people who are in a certain space where they're trained, they're skilled, they're able to go out there, and they have the confidence to take part in that economy.
I still have a couple of areas in my community that were devastated. They're still reeling from the downturn in the offshore fishery, which happened in the early 1990s. They haven't bounced back from that yet. They don't have the skills and they don't have the confidence.
There's one particular area in my constituency where it's been really tough dragging them over the hump. Sometimes the standard programs just can't get there. They need a little bit of something. If it's confidence or a change in attitude or the actual skills they need to support them, I still think government can play a role there.
Those communities are becoming fewer and fewer, but if we're staring down the barrel of a recession, they may become even more frequent; I don't know.
I don't disagree with what Mr. Lessard is saying at all. There are communities that need these supports, and I think government has a role to play.