Thank you, and thanks for coming today.
You covered a lot of territory in your speech, so I'm assuming we only have five minutes, Mr. Chair.
I don't have the exact wording of the study, but essentially what we're looking at is assessing skill shortages and coming up with plans to deal with that in a number of particular areas. A number of research papers have been done on assessing the viability of labour market information. I have two here: one is from the Canadian Council on Learning, entitled “Is it Possible to Accurately Forecast Labour Market Needs?” The other is from the Canadian Policy Research Networks, titled “Connecting Supply and Demand in Canada’s Youth Labour Market”.
In both cases, they have identified some problems with the way we gather information on the labour market and our ability to forecast longer-range needs. I don't mean we here or the government, but broadly in society. I think we've seen a number of mismatches over the last many years. I wonder if you could comment specifically on the demand side—not on the supply side—and what your department does around gathering demand-side information.