Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here today.
In my local community, the college campus partnered with the school district and actually had eight grade 12 students go with a contractor and build a home right from the foundation up. It was a really interesting project, and they were actually accredited as first-year apprentices. Out of those eight, six were offered jobs in Vancouver—I live in the interior—because there was a high demand.
Is there any work being done to try to capture the students in high school and get them interested? The good thing is they'd have the exposure, and if they didn't like it then they'd realize it wasn't for them. Otherwise they wait until they're 26, because a lot of them can't find a job anywhere else and they decide they're going to go into a trade, and they really don't know what trade they want to go into, and they're just sort of doing things ad hoc. I was wondering if there was any effort at all to try to link up the training with the school districts, between the high schools and the industry.
The sponsor of this was the local college. The local construction association went together on this with the school district, and it's been very successful. I was just wondering if you've had any experience in that.