Thank you.
On our slide deck, we'll reference slide number 3 to begin with.
J.D. Irving, Limited has a long, proud history of operations here in Atlantic Canada, particularly in the province of New Brunswick.
Our core business is forestry and forest products. As you can see, we're diversified across a number of industries, from construction and shipbuilding to retail and consumer products.
Moving ahead to slide number 4, you can see a snapshot of our projection for our workforce needs over the next three years up to 2019. It highlights that we have a number of job opportunities, career opportunities, with our projection being a little over 7,700 jobs to fill to 2019 in Atlantic Canada, with most of those jobs being here in New Brunswick.
Moving ahead to slide number 5, you can see a snapshot of a number of our jobs here in New Brunswick where the core requirements around education require high school, trade certification, or a college degree. Our highlight here is that these are good jobs, local jobs. Our requirement is for an educated and skilled workforce to fill these roles.
Similarly, moving ahead to slide number 6, you can see our projection of almost 730 jobs in New Brunswick for which a university education will be required, again emphasizing an educated and skilled workforce. Most of those jobs, as you can see, are in engineering and finance, right at the top of the list.
From a strategy perspective, moving forward to slide number 7, our strategy for growing and building our workforce has four key pillars, starting with keeping folks at home. For us, that's about engaging the next generation workforce but also growing and developing our workforce here at home, and that's about building the skills and capability of the Atlantic Canada workforce.
One of our pillars is also looking to bring Atlantic Canadians home, whether that's from across Canada or elsewhere. Of course, the immigration piece, working to find people to make Atlantic Canada their home, would be the fourth pillar of our overall strategy.