This program, and frankly Chair and members of the committee, it has been a challenging issue of public policy to achieve the right kind of balance between a proven need and undue reliance on temporary foreign workers when the Canadian labour market can provide the workers.
In the case of universities, and I'm going to ask Paul to comment on the specific geographic locations, the essence of much of university recruitment is indeed to deliberately search for the best talent available in the world. The exemption was applied to the specific requirement in that high-skilled category of having detailed transition plans to a Canadian workforce.
We want to understand what is going on, what the trends are, be able to identify any inappropriate reliance on the TFW program, but it was because of the essential objectives of recruiting people from abroad that it made no sense in those particular cases to transition to a Canadian workforce. These institutions were deliberately blind as to the country of origin. They wanted the best experts, researchers, and scholars in those areas.
That explains the exemption and the approach in that regard with respect to the geographic areas where you sometimes have highly localized labour market conditions. We've done a lot of analysis on that, and Paul can comment.