Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Nanaimo—Cowichan for that very relevant question. I appreciate the work she has done on the file as our representative on the aboriginal affairs file.
The unemployment rate among aboriginal youth in my province and in many places across the country can be as high as 50% or 60%, four or five times higher than the already high unemployment rate for youth. There are communities in northern Manitoba where the unemployment rate is 85% to 90%. There is a vast pool of youth between 16 and 25 who, with an opportunity, could make a meaningful entrance into the workforce.
When I was head of the carpenters union, we did make an outreach effort specifically to go up and do some training in northern Manitoba because we had hydro dams going there. Believe me, a lot of the apprentices we signed in the aboriginal apprenticeship initiative found really satisfying careers in the construction industry. It is not a bad segue into the industrialized workforce, the construction and building trades.
It is hard work, and they are no strangers to hard work, growing up in the north. It is the high school kids from downtown Winnipeg who have a tough time getting into the construction industry, because it is hard work. These guys think it is easy money. For those who spent their life splitting wood and hauling fish nets in the wintertime, construction is easy money.
We are missing the boat by not matching the skills shortages that everybody knows about in the construction industry and the human resources surplus that is under our nose. Surely it is cheaper to train a kid from Pukatawagan than it is to fly them in from Lebanon or Southeast Asia or wherever these other temporary foreign workers are coming from. For God's sake, it is completely counterintuitive.