Thank you, Mr. Chair.
A number of you have said that we could be doing what they are doing in Europe. Last September, I accompanied the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour to Turin. We visited a centre there that the government had mandated to stimulate enrolment in training and apprenticeship programs for young, disadvantaged immigrants, specifically from the flood of immigrants from Africa.
The people in the centre, whose mandate was to properly pair up employers with apprentices, noticed that a third person, a social worker, was needed. The employers, who were often SMEs, were somewhat ill-equipped to deal with the family problems the apprentices could be going through, either because of their children or their parents. Apprentices could also be experiencing various difficulties, or could come from a criminal background, and the employers did not have the resources they needed to support them. So the centre received funding to meet the young peoples' needs in all aspects of their lives, and to set them up for success in their apprenticeship programs.
Do you think that could be transferred here to complement existing apprenticeship programs?