Yes. I think if you look at the national view, the participation rate is the fraction of the people who are over 15 and want to work, are looking for work, or are working. The labour force is rising for those who are 15 to 64.
Even for those 15 and over, although the participation rate in aggregate is coming down somewhat, the total labour force continues to expand. There are new bodies—in other words, net—entering into the labour force. This is with some immigration going on. It's sort of the base level we have at the current time, but not extraordinary means of running out and hiring temporary workers and going down that road.
When you start looking at a particular area, however, you have to contend with the issue of mobility of people outside that area, people leaving. There are certain parts of this country that have declining population. If they had a problem trying to find skills, etc., they may be doing that off a smaller base. Unfortunately, of course, what happens when people move is that they often take their jobs with them or are unemployed. Hence you're not, in some sense, losing anything.
We have some very low unemployment communities in Canada, but that's because a lot of the labour force is gone and employment has declined. You're sort of saying that you're not learning the right thing from looking at this unemployment rate for this region.
I would be an optimist, though, in terms of what we can do. Keep in mind that every year, thousands of people move from one part of Canada to another. There's more migration, as we would call it, back and forth from one province to another than there is total net immigration of people from abroad. If you're concerned about getting your labour market to function well in a particular area, then you should be looking at the much broader picture.
For example, Nova Scotia at the moment is trying to increase the number of immigrants. It has a department to do that. I said rather cynically one day that they had more people in the department that they had immigrants. There's a lot of movement of people in migration from the rest of Canada—some going home, some going there to retire, some going there to work with particular skills. You'll see a big jump in that as people go to work in Nova Scotia for the shipbuilding exercises as they get under way.
Just think of that as a fluid exercise. It's awfully easy to fall into the trap of just thinking that these are all sort of fixed containers. You really ought to be thinking of them as a pool. You have coloured water that you pour in one spot, and you pour another colour in here, and you just watch it, and things start moving around and eventually the whole thing is grey.