Thank you very much, Mr. Mayes.
You've identified what I think is perhaps the single most important thing we could do. We all know that our greatest social problems, sadly, tend to be experienced disproportionately by our aboriginal people. We recognize that much of the economic development occurring in our country is in aboriginal parts of the country and that many of the companies there are facing skills shortages.
Anything we can do to prepare young Canadian aboriginals in particular for those jobs solves many problems at once: skills shortages, facilitating growth, and helping young aboriginal Canadians to realize their potential. That is why we are investing very significantly in aboriginal skills development, particularly through the first nations job fund, which, as you've identified, is committing $241 million to connect first nations youth between the ages of 18 and 24 with skills training and jobs.
We do this in collaboration with first nations organizations in various regions of the country. We try to get feedback from them on their priorities. We encourage them to approach us, in partnership with employers as much as possible. We want to see a private sector commitment to that job training.
Let me blunt. We are not going to succeed in getting unemployed young aboriginals into the workforce in significant numbers without a hard money commitment from the private sector. This is a larger message that I've been sending, by the way, to the private sector, which I hope my friends from the NDP would applaud. I have said that Canadian governments spend more than virtually any other governments in the developed world on skills development and job training, but the Canadian private sector, according to the OECD, is at the bottom end of the developed world in skills development and job training.
As to Mr. Cuzner's reference to some of the aggregate labour market information, I'm very concerned. We keep hearing complaints, today from John Manley at the Council of Chief Executives, and last week the Canadian Chamber of Commerce—all those organizations—about skills shortages. Yet the labour market information tells us that wage levels on an aggregate basis have barely been keeping pace with inflation.
I've said bluntly and publicly to employers that if they want a solution to the problem of the skills mismatch, they have two big market levers at their disposal. One is a greater investment in training that should focus on under-represented groups in the labour force, like aboriginals, and another is wage levels.
I said that in Vancouver, Ms. Sims, and the only person who applauded me was Jim Sinclair from the B.C. Federation of Labour. So I am pleased to be onside—