To comment on that, in a previous life I worked as the director of HR at IMP Aerospace, in Amherst, Nova Scotia. We developed a program with the local community college that saw an advertisement go out for people who wanted to work in our aerospace divisions. One of the requirements was that you were on unemployment insurance or on welfare and were willing to go through an eleven-week program, during which your benefits would be maintained. In cooperation with the industry, we took these people and put them through some job readiness training at the community college level, and at the community college a lot of it was computer-based. In a lot of cases, these were minorities or females who were non-traditional workers.
It was in excess of 90% successful in taking people through a program that actually put them to work at the end of the program. We brought them into the plant and employed everyone who made it through the program. Without exception, they were extraordinary workers. They had the right attitude. They had the right approach. They had already committed eleven weeks of their own lives to getting trained. In the last three weeks, the industry actually took the people off-site, where we taught them how to fabricate skins for aircraft, bonding methods for putting composites together, riveting, welding, and using the skills that are required in the industry. It was a tremendous success.
We tried to do that again at Maritime Steel fairly recently as we were going through an extremely rapid growth rate, but the opportunity wasn't there. We tried to work with the Canada Employment Centre, HRSDC, and the community college to replicate the program. For whatever reason, though, it didn't work. We weren't able to get there.