It has come up a lot in terms of.... It's like the chicken or the egg. You have a company saying that it would like to come but the labour supply is not there. In other cases, we are talking with post-secondary education about whether they should be trying to anticipate labour demands, say, in clean tech, and start training students in advance. What we came out with was that the big risk is then on students, if the demand never comes. The risk is that you bring a lot of people into a region who can do a certain type of activity, say trucking or something else, and the labour demand never emerges. That can be devastating for trying to recruit newcomers in the future, because you've been burned once.
On the other side, if you bring the firms in and you can't find them the labour supply, they are going to argue that this is not a good place to invest and then they'll go away. The challenge for the policy-maker—who has to live in the real world, unlike me—is that you have to figure out how to coordinate these two sides of the market and figure out the best strategy to enable the two things to happen at the same time.
My message today wasn't to be doom and gloom; it was more just to continually remind everyone that we have to think about supply and demand if we want this to work. Focusing on one I just don't think is going to succeed.