Thank you for coming, Mr. Orr.
I was very interested in the first part of your conversation, but the last part about relocation really disturbs me, especially as I'm from a rural region and a region in eastern Canada. There's the assumption that we should start moving people around this country to follow the jobs as the solution. Especially for the rural communities, it really decimates them, and leaves them very short of tax base and various things.
I'll just give you an example of what we went through in Cape Breton ten years ago. We lost our groundfish industry, then we lost our coal industry because of international markets, and then we lost our steel industry. So we lost about 15,000 jobs in that region and went to 28% unemployment.
One could sit there and use your model and say let's just tell them all to go to Alberta, and that would have pretty well emptied out the community and that would have been the end of it. That's not what happened. There were funds available, and we had a development agency, and there was some help there from HRDC for retraining--retraining the coal miners, retraining the fish plant workers to work in telecommunications and various things. Right now we're at 13% unemployment. The community is doing quite well and we'd like to be at the national average. Yes, some of our people are working in Alberta, but they're coming back and forth, so their families are staying intact.
So I think it's a simple solution to say let them move. If you close a major lumber mill somewhere, or if you change a fishing industry, let them all move. But I think we can be more creative in this country. I think we can help. Businesses sometimes come to regions that are facing challenges. We can retrain workers so they can stay in the regions. Sometimes it's cheaper for companies to set up the infrastructure in these regions.
I'd like you to comment on that, that maybe there are models out there that can help people retrain, and communities can survive and go through this, with some government intervention and help. They're not to be there to subsidize them forever, and not to be there holding them up by the hand all the time, but helping them get through that transition, helping them introduce new industries to their towns, and helping them get through that.
I'd like to have your comments on that, because the model worked for us, and I think it could work in many other regions.