Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.
Good luck, Frank, in your future endeavours. I'm sure the challenge at CRA will be as great, if not greater.
I have a couple of things to say.
First is a compliment. Supporting more effective returns to work—the earlier intervention—has always been a contention. If somebody were looking for training opportunities, if they had a month left.... I don't know where you draw your facts from, but I don't dispute them. Anecdotally I would say that people look a little deeper into the claim before they look for that training opportunity. If they only have a couple of months left on a claim, the fee payer wouldn't necessarily be smiled on for training assistance because they were that deep into it. So I think that early intervention there would be of great help.
Hiving this off to the provinces, though, would make it more of a challenge to pull together labour market information. We know that good policy is driven by good information. The minister himself said last week that there is not good information out there. When the Prime Minister said that the country should be seized by this crisis of the skills deficiency, that was the talk last year. Now they've stepped back from that and said there's certain sectors, certain areas of the country, that have skill shortages. That's where the continuum of discussion has gone.
Don Drummond came out with a report, in 2009, and made specific recommendations on the gathering of labour market information. Where has the department gone with responding to the recommendations that would have been made by Don Drummond at the time?