Thank you, Mr. Hogg.
I don't have those stats with me. Anecdotally, I've read some reports. I know that getting the program up and started was a little challenging at first, but in the second year there has been a great deal of success. It's been region to region, or province to province, in terms of the success they've had in being able to fill some of those labour gaps.
As for what this would do, when you look at the Atlantic model, it was just getting back to the ability to be nimble enough to bring in a workforce that would help a company expand. What we would see in the GTHA, as well as the entire country, is that ability for organized labour—I've heard this from employers, contractors and associations—to bring in that labour through a stream in working with the provinces, as in the Atlantic model. Of course, if you're bringing that labour into your region to help it expand in your region or to help with the gap you have in labour, you wouldn't want it moving elsewhere. I don't see that happening.
What I've seen is a need for more of these workers. You can go to any job site in the greater Toronto area—it may be the same in Vancouver—and you will see that many of the workers are in their fifties and even their sixties now. They're going to retire. This is not easy work. They continue to do the work, and I have employers who continue to beg them to come back and will pay a lot more for their services because they can't find others to address their shortage.
Again, I go back to how many times bureaucrats and others see this as no-skill or low-skill work. Try to frame a house or try to frame a business or do some formwork. You've done bricklaying. It's not something that you just pick up in one day and start doing. You need the training to be able to do it as a skilled craftsperson, but also as somebody who wants to invest in that trade.
I don't think we're doing it really well here in Canada. Look at other places, at Europe, at Austria and Germany, etc. They will start you in the trades in your teens, at 17 and 18 and even earlier. You have kids who are 16 years old and already learning how to do this stuff, and they become artists. They are artists. Look at the work that's done here on Parliament Hill.