Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome, all.
I have had the pleasure of working with some of you over the past number of years, and I know that you do some incredible work.
Some of the questions might be more about policy than about administration, but let me try to connect the dots, as I've heard a lot of material here about industry, natural resources, and human resources. Tourism obviously is something we might want to talk about.
This country has had it pretty good over the past number of years, with low energy costs, low dollar, and low interest rates, but everybody so far who has come before our committee, including the Governor of the Bank of Canada, has indicated that there are some pretty dark clouds looming out there in the form of high energy costs, high dollar, increases in interest rates, and a whole bunch of other factors, including competition.
But everyone also talked about the even graver situation in which our country finds itself, in the form of our demographic challenges. I want to talk a little bit about the human resources side of things, but I need to understand. There's no doubt that government can't do it. Labour obviously wants to do it. Industry and all the CEOs believe that their biggest challenge, regardless of all those other macro issues that they have to deal with, is meeting the human resources needs of this country sector by sector. Meeting these is absolutely crucial if in fact we're going to continue to have an economy, and even a competitive one.
Two hundred thousand jobs have been lost in the manufacturing sector. We understand that in fact, in the coming year, another 200,000 jobs may be shed, all because of things...and yet there are 250,000 jobs going wanting somewhere in this country. That mismatch between the jobs that are required and the skills that are not there was spoken about, and I want to know what you're doing.
I know we have the sectoral councils, but between the three levels of administration, from human resources to industry to natural resources, what degree of cooperation is there, not only between us in government and other levels of government, but between educators, labour, and business, to do exactly the same thing we've just talked about? There are all kinds of mobility, and the internal barriers, and the regulatory stuff that come into play. How is it that we're going to be able to fix this big nut, to make sure we attract and retain the kinds of skills and human resources that this country's going to need in the next 10 or 15 years in order to continue to have a strong economy?
If I could have your comments on that, I would appreciate it.