Thank you.
I'd like to thank the minister for being here today. The minister has a reputation for being very accessible, and I'd like to thank him for that.
Mr. Minister, we've had a number of witnesses testify before this committee. We had the Canadian Restaurant Association come and tell us:
We face significant labour shortages by 2025, with over 142,000 full-time jobs projected to go unfilled. Thirty per cent of our members are concerned about labour shortages right now.
We met the other night with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, and they told us that they clearly face serious shortages of workers, particularly in the skilled trades.
We know demographically that the number of Canadians over the age of 60 is projected to go from one in five today to one in three by 2020.
A 2009 study by the C.D. Howe Institute concludes that we would need an improbably large increase—and that's something we're suggesting—from the 2010 level of 0.8% to almost 4% just to stabilize Canada's current old age dependency ratio.
Of course, CIC, itself, has said:
Very soon, the number of new entrants from Canadian schools and universities will equal (or fall short of) the number of retirees, leaving immigration responsible for all labour force growth.
Mr. Minister, we know that you've kept the annual levels flat over the last five years, at 254,000. If we keep our annual average the same, as you've announced, as the previous five years, how do you foresee Canada dealing with our looming demographic changes and upcoming labour shortages?