I would like to share a little bit of my time with the legendary Rodger Cuzner.
I'm interested in the process we've been following when we're talking about the challenges we have in being able to get enough employment and looking at the micro level and comparing it across Canada. In metro Vancouver, certainly, we have similar dramatic challenges, if not more dramatic. We're starting to pay employees to travel. We're paying travel time and a number of other things to get them to the workplace. We have big challenges within that.
We're talking about the stress test and wanting to encourage growth, yet we don't have enough people to meet the demands. In the first part of the testimony, we heard that we don't have enough people to meet the demands that are there, and now we're talking about how to increase the demand even further.
I'm wondering about looking at a macro perspective, looking outside of here, and whether we can learn from that. Reference was made to Australia, Germany and other jurisdictions. Are there some ways to do that, given that unemployment rates are very low and it seems that the proposals are about how we fight for a limited workforce that is not going to expand? We have more retirements coming and more demands.
It looks as though the only solutions I'm seeing, from what you're talking about, are getting some externals and getting temporary foreign workers and other types of models. Do you have any experience from other jurisdictions that might help inform us in terms of how we might strategize around that?