I appreciate your comment because it was a flashback to my own experience in many ways. I had initially graduated in civil and forest engineering and was working out in the bush. But then I ended up actually retraining as an accountant. Nothing against accountants, but I hated every minute of it. It was simply a job that I was doing that provided an opportunity for going forward. Ultimately, I ended up in HR. So I was fortunate.
Very specifically, I think what could be done in your case or in the government's case is this. I see a huge opportunity for alignment, in the sense that you wouldn't want to take somebody who's been in the field and all of a sudden put him into an office job here in Ottawa or Vancouver or Toronto, wherever. That doesn't make any sense. In terms of warehousing, when we introduced our program, you would think that in a company in Canada--we had almost 12,000 employees--you'd have a significant number of opportunities. It was difficult, simply because of a whole bunch of rules and regulations and being spread across the country.
But in this case you have a tremendous workforce. If you look at what I think would be areas that are fairly close to a front-line service, if you look at Fisheries and Oceans, if you look at Parks Canada, if you look at labour inspectors at part of Labour Canada, if you look at folks who work at Industry Canada, if you look at the coast guard, the list is essentially quite endless.
While it may not be possible for somebody to go back into the military, if you went with something else that was along the same lines, that was fairly closely aligned with the interests of the individual, then I think you'd have a much higher success rate. But that requires some bureaucratic flexibility. That requires folks saying, “Look, we're not going to drive a square peg into a round hole. We're going to look at what actually makes sense.”
If I didn't have the option of doing what I'm doing today, if I continued being, if you will, a bean counter, then that would have been very challenging, because it just doesn't fit my background and personality and so on. So I think in this case the key is looking at creative solutions, and the government has those.