Well, it's funny.... In terms of issues that we would want to present here today, we had framed up what we thought was a good presentation on a lot of different aspects. Since the announcement on EI last week, we took the trouble to go across the country to our board of directors, who are from all the provinces and territories, and there has been an awful lot of absolute anxiety and stress, and also the belief that there will be a net total loss of the labour pool as well as skills.
If I could, I'll illustrate that a little bit. I'm a farm enterprise employer myself. I own the largest silver fox farm in the world, actually, in North Harbour, Placentia Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador. In my enterprise, I have a breeding season of about six months. I have developed a level of expertise there that's very important to me. It has come with experience, apprenticeship-type approaches, and some formal education.
Unfortunately, I don't have the extra six months to fill in labour for that person. If that person were to find himself out into the workforce through some of the different gateways that are now being established through the new rules of EI, I would be absolutely devastated. If I couldn't get that worker back, I don't know where I could find another worker. That's a small example to illustrate what others have told me almost entirely—for example, in the fruit industry, the horticulture industry, and other livestock industries.
While it would appear that some of the jobs are low-skilled, if you will, on labour, that is in fact not the case. What's going to happen here is that it's really going to push producers to start to more aggressively get more foreign workers to come in. I think that's counter to what the objectives are of the EI program as I see it—