Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate, Chair, that you asked Mr. Rochon to finish off the piece about the macro job numbers, although I have to be candid: I'm not overly pleased, in a sense, that we're looking at the macro. I understand the difficulties of a macro look at what five weeks of additional unemployment means to an economy. It gives you a macro number, but I can tell you that in my riding of Welland, five weeks did mean a heck of a lot.
It meant something to those individuals, but that economy is still almost stagnant, and it has been for 13 years, though, so I can't blame it on this past 18 months. We have seen manufacturing malaise there for the last 13 years. It has simply accelerated over the last 18 months. It is simply a different indicator.
In the Auditor General's report, Mr. Campbell, you actually talked about the sense that you did get some decent hard numbers from certain projects, and then you got unreliable stuff from other projects. I guess my question is, would it not seem appropriate, since you can do it in some projects, specifically when you're counting the numbers of jobs...? A lot of it would come out of infrastructure, to be quite frank.
If you decide, as in one of my municipalities, to redo the streets, including sidewalks, sewers, curbing, and all the rest of it, you hire a contractor. The report from the contractor can be that they put x number of hours on the street, and that breaks down to the great FTE, which I find really difficult to explain to real people in regard to what that means in the sense of how it impacts upon them.
I guess this question is for you, Mr. Campbell. Is this not hard data that we really should get in the sense of making it a real number rather than the sort of big picture from 10,000 feet?