Mr. Chairman, since coming to Ottawa...and I know that regardless of the political stripe or the party, the responsibility of an elected official is to bring the experience on behalf of their constituents to Ottawa and hopefully get a fair deal from the centre. Certainly, in representing similar communities--coastal, rural communities--it's always been a challenge to bring that experience to the centre and make the case in point.
For example, I know we had some success in some training of older workers from the fishery. The nature of the fishery is that there's an immense amount of work for a short period of time, and you need the bodies on hand to get this done, whether it's crab or finfish you're processing, or whatever it might be. You need the people for long hours in difficult situations for a short period of time.
We put a call centre in one of these communities and we couldn't get people. We were looking at filling probably 100 seats, and we got 50 seats filled. The last 50 seats were very difficult to fill because some of the women from that community had to travel half an hour to get to their work. Their husbands would be working in another section of the area, and there's no mass transit in some of these rural communities. I know you're laughing at the half-hour travel, guys, but when you can't access public.... You see, that's where you have to make the point. There's no public transit in these rural communities, and that's where the problem is. There's no day care. They can't just leave the kids at home watching Jerry Springer--