You have a Canadian economy that is increasingly urbanizing around a small number of very large cities and centres, and you have a large number of traditional industries like fishing and agriculture that are being hollowed out in terms of the traditional working-age population. They are aging more rapidly than the cities. Getting workers into those regions to maintain production in plants that are not investing in automating and remain highly dependent on labour, that's where, again, a lot of these decisions around immigration were coming through as a reaction to the lack of investment we see in Canada in advanced manufacturing and in automation. We were keeping the legacy plants going by finding a new supply of labour to replace the traditional younger Canadian labour supply that was no longer there.
The challenges in Ontario with its post-secondary system are different from the challenges we're facing, let's say, with labour supply needs in the Atlantic region. In Ontario, I don't know if they were planning to use the increase in college-educated personal service workers coming out to solve some of the health care problems like they were in Atlantic Canada, but with the direct ties in the college system in our region, we're looking at programs that would produce graduates who could go to work in, say, the care sector, so there was at least some thinking around how to find the care workers for the population that isn't getting access to the services they need. Again, there was no study in advance on whether that works. It was based on a belief that you'll train them, that the jobs will be there and they'll take the jobs.
It's a rambling answer, but the real reason I think we did a lot of this was the labour shortage narrative that came in. A lot of employers were struggling to make ends meet with a lot of the margins and labour market policies coming in. If you can't raise your wages, you need to find another supply of labour to keep the lights on. I think that's what was happening in a lot of places.