Thank you for the question, Madame Chabot.
If I understood the question correctly, you were asking how the economic pressures of labour shortages might coincide with inflationary pressures facing all businesses.
I know the transitory phase has been going on a lot longer than anybody would have liked, but we did have a war in addition to a pandemic that won't go away because we won't treat it seriously. The inflationary pressures are unlikely to last over the long term, whereas the labour shortage issues are likely to accelerate over the next couple of decades. We need a strategy to deal with that. Simply saying that rising wages are going to do it will actually lead to more inflation, if that's our only strategy.
We can absolutely maximize the potential of people we underutilize in our own economy—indigenous populations, youth at risk, people who are disabled, recent immigrants and women. We could be using all sorts of people more fully, using their potential more fully. We could be using people who already have training.
I was interested to hear what Richard Holden said about the dental technicians. Certainly one of the ways we met the primary and preventive care needs of children for dental care in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Saskatchewan and Manitoba was by setting up schools for dental technicians so that dentists became not the number one way that we provided primary and preventive care but rather the backup, and dental technicians did most of the heavy lifting by going to the schools for children under the age of 13, to pre-high school kids, to provide initial primary and preventive care. That's an indication that we are underutilizing the capacity we have right under our nose.
As I said in my presentation, I think there are other ways we can prevent wages from being the primary inflationary thing. Some of the key examples of the last year were the early learning and child care agreements, which will support better wages in the sector providing the care but also reduce costs to parents.
In an era when one in four Canadians is going to be a senior and living on a lower income or a fixed income, and will be very resistant to seeing any protracted period of inflation—