Thank you, everyone.
Mr. Busby, as our chairman asked you, you cited some statistics showing the variation in unemployment rates between central Alberta and a place whose name I forget somewhere in the Atlantic Provinces. You mentioned 2% compared to 19%, I believe.
When I sat on the Finance Committee, representatives of the C.D. Howe Institute addressed this problem and that of labour mobility. I think you're looking at things backwards. Perhaps we should talk more about job mobility. People are not livestock that we can move from one end of the country to the other based on economic needs. If people live in the Atlantic provinces, were raised there and have lived there, it's because they prefer the smell of the sea to that of the oil sands. If people from Quebec don't go to Alberta, it's because they belong to a different culture, their language is different, and they don't want to go and live in Alberta. However, other people live there and like it there, and so much the better.
Whether it be through our immigration policies or any other social policy, we should try to establish our economic policy so that it meets our social needs rather than try to move people and adapt our social policies to economic reality. That's what we see these days, and we wonder whether we should continue encouraging the oil sands development, in particular.
I'm not going to go too far in that direction because I'm straying from the subject and our chairman is very touchy about that today. Getting back to immigration, do you think we're not really solving the problem by relying mainly on temporary foreign workers to offset major labour shortages in certain places? Shouldn't we opt instead for an economic policy designed to create jobs in certain regions, thus striking a better balance?