The first question you asked I think is the key one: How do we attract people into these occupations? I think the answer is that it's the same way we attract people into any occupation; that is, the occupations are seen to be and are reliably rewarding for the people who enter them. To the extent the trades occupations are seen to be consistently rewarding and to pay off people's educational investments, I think they will attract people to them in the way that medicine and dentistry and law and accounting and all kinds of other professions attract people to them.
The problem I see is that when we have two-thirds of the labour force in the skilled trades who are not certified and people are being encouraged to go and invest in training and then go out and compete for jobs that non-certified people can get, there's very little incentive to invest in that education. That education, in many cases, doesn't pay off for the people who do invest in it.
I think one of the key reasons that we see the very high dropout rates that we see from apprenticeship is that apprentices discover—often after they've invested a considerable amount of time and effort in their training—that persisting with their training isn't going to get them any greater job security. It's not going to get them any greater wages than they currently get as an apprentice. I think that's the key issue. The economics of the training system need to reward those who invest more than those who do not invest.