I guess I'd say a couple of things. One is the labour mobility within Canada has to change. We have to be able to bring skilled workers across Canada from different parts of Canada to where the labour shortages exist. But that is only going to go so far.
Look again just at Alberta, because that's where a lot of the economic growth is right now, and it's pulling a lot of the rest of the Canadian economy with it, which is good because it benefits everyone. They have a skill shortage of about 300,000 workers coming over the next decade, 300,000 new, additional workers to everything they have today. That's really difficult to fill with the local labour pool, given that they only have a population of about three or four million people in Alberta, and unemployment is already at incredibly low levels.
Their ability to continue those major projects and continue to push and pump the Canadian economy is really challenged as a result, and manufacturers are challenged as a result as well. So we need to allow people to move in from within Canada, and we probably need to look at some of our closest allies. There are some big unemployment problems in the United States. Maybe we need the ability to move workers up from the United States on a temporary basis. I know it has been done. When there have been really critical shortages, they've allowed in the range of 1,000 or 1,500 workers to come up on a temporary basis to do welding and things like that. They gave them temporary certifications. Those types of things need to be done as well.
In the longer-term sense of things, we should trust that someone certified in the United States to weld a pipe or to be a carpenter or a plumber is probably safe enough for a Canadian to employ as well, and let the employers be the judge of whether the skills are adequate.
When you look at the broader global scale and what we bring in, we need to do a better job of categorizing and analyzing what's out there, of recognizing the credentials that people have on their way in, before they ever get here, so we can speed up that process a lot more.
We can't have companies waiting. If you're trying to build a plant, any type of project, or some type of consumable good, and have to wait four, five, or six months after you've done an interview process on a candidate, that's a really long time in the business world. You lose a lot of business if you're holding up a production process while you're looking for one person. We need to shorten some of those timelines down as well.