This is on the trading issue, because I think it is really very important. There are three issues here: there's access to labour, there is training, and there is the type of curriculum that's being offered in our training establishments, in our schools. I think there are things to say on each of these.
On access to labour, there's the immigration process, the selection of the types of skills that are actually needed by industry, and speeding up the process for bringing those people in and making sure immigrants are integrated into the workforce. Manufacturing has a big stake in this; 30% of manufacturing workers are recent immigrants. This is the sector that is the most integrative of all of the sectors.
There's the aboriginal community—making sure that aboriginal workers are well integrated in the industrial workforce. The major problem there is not the ability to integrate well-skilled aboriginal people into the industrial workforce. The major issue is the communities young people come from and the whole aboriginal community base. That is an issue that is very important, if we're looking at how to bring aboriginal workers into industry.
There are the issues around accreditation and the recognition of credits across educational training establishments. Institutional issues are one of the biggest barriers to labour mobility. But there may be ways of tying funding to the institutions.
On the training side, the onus for making these adjustments rests on entrepreneurs. It rests on business; it rests on manufacturers. At the end of the day, government is not going to solve these problems for manufacturers if manufacturers themselves aren't world-class in their management. But with training.... If cashflow is under pressure, training budgets are the first to be cut. Maybe there are some ways companies that are providing training for employees can offset some of that against other payroll taxes, such as EI. There's a possibility there.
On the education system, we have to make sure we have the best business and technical education in the world in this country. We don't now. In colleges and universities we are not training or educating people to the requirements of modern manufacturing. We have to make sure, for instance, that our research projects go into research into the types of facilities that are actually required by the future, by modern manufacturing and modern business going forward, and not into the research agendas and the types of education that perhaps thesis supervisors and professors were looking at 20 years ago. We have to make sure this is a very forward-looking curriculum that actually responds to the needs of industry.