That program, in our mind, was put in place to deal with a specific situation at that one point in time. It doesn't really exist anywhere else in the mining industry except for that incident in B.C. itself. I've been in the mining industry for 35 years now. I've worked in uranium mines, nickel mines. I've worked in all kinds of mines over my career. I can recall the early days in our school system. The reason we look at those workers is because we don't have the ability in Canada itself to get the specialty skills that we need. They're not currently available. They're very rare, I should say.
We all know that the skilled trades will be 80,000 workers short within the next five years. There are stats all over the place that show that. Our current school system, including high schools, does not have the same ability it used to have 25 years ago, when we had shops in the high schools and all this stuff that would really promote students to follow that path. That's gone away now for some reason. It has to come back. We have to make sure that comes back.
The other issue is that, even in our universities or colleges, a lot of focus was put on getting diplomas—not as much in colleges, but universities—in administrative skills versus the actual skilled labour. We need to get around that.
Also, we used to have lots of subsidies for employers to offer apprenticeships, a lot more than we do today. That has to come back, otherwise it's hard to get regular Canadians to get the right skills they need to be employed by those mining companies.